The numbers are horrific — highest poverty rates in years — and the efforts on the table are just not good enough.
New Jersey, for instance, is looking to institute mobile farmers’ markets, which as I said yesterday, can be useful but really are nothing more than a Band-Aid.
Even the very good proposals offered by Katrina vanden Heuvel today on The Nation Web site — including an increase in food stamp allocations — will do nothing to address the larger causes of poverty.
To really make a dent in this problem, we need to do more. We need to upend our economic system and rebuild it. We need to realize that corporations are not the best of most efficient providers of services, that they exist only to build profit and nothing else — and they do that by charging as much as they can get away with while doing everything they can to keep costs down.
Enough is enough. Our well-being is more important than the corporate order.
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Hank Kalet 
If you want to make a real move to cure \”poverty\”, (bearing in mind that \”poverty\” in America is unlike \”poverty\” in a Third World country), let's eliminate the minimum wage.Yes, I know, you're picking your jaw off the deck.Now before you dust off the old nonsense that a family can't live on the minimum wage, let's put that to rest. We have the earned income tax credit as well as welfare programs to help out. We can begin to encourage folks to join the working class. Welfare has \”trained\” people to live on the dole. Rudy G in MYC demonstrated that more that half of the folks on welfare work under the table or on phony social security numbers. Welfare work requirements cleared a lot from the rolls.The minimum wage is a payoff to the unions and the bureaucrats. Raising the minimum wage boosts the Gooferment pay tables. And, it's pulling up the bottom rungs of the ladder of opportunity.That's one thing that would radically change the face of \”poverty\” in the USA!
Let's not play around here. Let's just declare poverty a crime and jail all the poor people. Jail the poor children, too, jail the poor old people, jail all the poor. It will create thousands of jobs in the private corrections industry. Poor people are moochers who drag the producers down and they deserve to be jailed. There, that was easy.