You’ve heard me rant and rave about poverty and the phony baloney statistics we use to measure it.  This is for a few different reasons. 

First, as I explained yesterday on the program, there are just three choices that you can make in life that will virtually ensure that you will not be poor.  Those three things are get an education (finish high school), get a job (any job) and get married before having children (preferably after age 21).  You do those three things are your chances of being poor fall from 12% to just 2%.  Use wisely your power of choice.  Poverty is a choice.

Another thing … poverty statistics are a joke because of the definition of poverty in America.  In America, a millionaire can be considered poor if he isn’t pulling in an income.  Also, the average poor person in America has a better living standard than the average European.  Not the average poor European .. the average European.  The typical poor household in America has a car, air conditioning, cable or satellite TV, multiple TVs with a DVD player, a refrigerator, microwave, a personal computer and even a gaming system like an Xbox or Playstation.

This is all leading to something and it is this: After decades of spending hundreds of billions of dollars on anti-poverty programs, the national poverty rate has not declined.  That’s right, ever since Lyndon Johnson declared his War on Poverty in 1965, the poverty rate currently remains the same at about 15%.  And Barack Obama has almost doubled federal spending on poverty initiatives, increasing federal welfare spending by 41% since January 2009.  Federal welfare spending in fiscal year 2011 totaled $668 billion, spread out over 126 programs.

Obama slobberers will point out the recession as an obvious reason for the increase in welfare spending.  But this study by the Cato Institute points out that some of the increase is deliberate, because the Obama administration has expanded the eligibility for some programs.  In fact, the study points out that “according to the administration’s own projections, federal welfare spending is unlikely to decline even after the economy recovers – further evidence that not all of the increase in spending is recession-related.”

Deliberate, indeed.  An article from CNNMoney just yesterday: “More than one in seven Americans are on food stamps, but the federal government wants even more people to sign up for the safety net program.  The U.S. Department of Agriculture has been running radio ads for the past four months encouraging those eligible to enroll. The campaign is targeted at the elderly, working poor, the unemployed and Hispanics.”  They are spending millions of dollars to advertise welfare programs, which is leading to … more people on welfare!

And at the end of the day, American taxpayers spend billions on welfare programs like food stamps ($80 billion), and how is that money spent?  No one knows.  The government can’t tell you because it doesn’t accurately track it.  I’m not surprised a bit.