Two truly depressing charts for poverty and equality 'warriors'

You can do lots of stuff and blow lots of money but it doesn't help. We burn about $20,000 in government funds per poor person per year today. Here's a graph of just the Federal portion that has been adjusted for Inflation:

Leave it to the Feds to take a steadily improving trend and turn it into an insanely expensive permanent racket.
 

But it's unfair to compare the 1972 poverty rate to today's because in '72 most of the poor were in intact families, today almost none are and in '72 they had a 25 year history of declining poverty to give them hope. Yet poor people have never been more isolated, depraved and felonized than they are today. But of course the reason there are so many poor people in America today is a lack of spending on poverty programs administered by Democrat party stalwarts.  Sure.  Right.  Whatever.
 

And of course the other 'standard' 'remedy' that the left trots out any time it wants to obscure the government's catastrophic anti poverty record - the minwage hike - positively screws kids. Particularly poor minority kids. 

 

The way to read the chart is that the black lines are the pre-Minwage hike employment trend and the red lines the post Minwage  hike trend. In six of seven most recent instances increasing the minwage lead to declines or sharply lower growth in youth employment.  Here's a summarry of a bunch of other research on the topic.  One of their findings is that minwage hikes have the most deleterious impact on youth employment in the least regulated labor markets like the US.  So I guess the next left argument is that we should lock up our labor market like France so we can raise minwages with impunity.  That makes about as much sense as minwages...or blowing so much money on 'anti'-poverty programs that if we gave it to them straight without the party stalwart cut they wouldn't be poor.

It would really improve people's confidence if the inequality and class warriors had ever demonstrated any capacity to lift the poor and weak up because I don't think a strategy of just dragging the rich down is going to work.  But you wouldn't know that listening to the rhetoric coming from the Obami.  It's almost as if they have poverty Alzheimer's - they seem to discover the problem of poverty anew each day with each discredited, useless 'intervention' being new and exciting. And after a century of them being 'responsible' 'advocates' for the 'poor' the naïve shrieking is getting a tad tedious.