Poverty provides jobs for the middle class

Taxpayers last year spent $1 trillion on welfare programs for households below the poverty line — enough to give each low-income household a check for $60,000, $746 billion on welfare in the 2011 fiscal year, and states paid out $254 billion in matching funds. But of course there is a huge bureaucracy that takes its cut off the top, so if poverty disappeared tomorrow, millions of government workers and a service industry in the private sector would be out of jobs and they would be poor, so it would start all over.