Bad Arithmetic on the Battle Against Poverty

As part of the NYT's affirmative action program for right-wingers, it ran an oped column by Gary E. MacDougal, a former business consultant and executive and advisor to former Illinois Governor Jim Edgar. The main point of the piece is that we spend almost $1 trillion a year on anti-poverty programs (combining spending at all levels of government), yet we still have 46 million people in poverty. MacDougal does the arithmetic and points out that this comes to over $23,000 a year for each perso...