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Fighting poverty is like fighting ugly. The more plastic surgery you do the more ugly you find.
Poverty is not a hard number which states "if you make $X, you are not poor." I know that's what people like to think, with the poverty line and others, but it's simply not the case.
Being poor is a relative. If the average income for a family is $40k, then there will be a lot of people below that line. Fighting it the way we are, we're only moving the average up we're not actually improving those below the average.
You can increase the minimum wage, ok fine. Now cost of labor for everything goes up, along with it the higher level jobs now pay relatively less and so have to get pay raises along with it. All of a sudden those making minimum wage make no more relatively than before the change, but it DID make our cost of living higher than a foreign country. BAM our companies move overseas where it's cheaper relatively, and more mid/lower level jobs disappear.
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"Smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge, and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth." - Ashbel Smith as he laid the first cornerstone of the University of Texas
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