The welfare state – in the US, the state that was put in place by Lyndon B Johnson’s “Great Society” – isn’t so much about “solving poverty” as it is about “making poverty a permanently sustainable state that can be exploited for political gain”.
We can argue the specifics, and maybe even the conclusion.
But let’s say that was not the case; if the Democrats weren’t trying to build a permanent underclass beholden to them with the welfare state, how would you better design such a thing as one would with the Great Society?
Because that’s how it worked. Poverty in the US was in free fall until the nation “declared war” on it.:
We don’t have to guess what the Democrats were thinking when they created the plantation state. The architect came right out and said it.
“These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.”
Fast forward to 2010: Obamaphones
Post WWII/Korea whenever we have gone to war with someone/something it has ended badly.