>One of the funniest, bad sad, commentaries on life I ever read was by P.J. O'Rourke. It was on the state of poverty in the U.S. I don't have the book in front of me, so I don't have exact numbers, but it went something like this.
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>Poverty is defined as a family of 4 having less than a $20,000 yr income. IF you took all the families in the U.S. that fit this, then divided by the total spent by the U.S. gov't on poverty programs, you come out with $20,000 / family.
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>His point was that if you have a guy in gov't whose job it is to sign checks for poor folk, and didn't have to have all these agencies involved, it would seem that there wouldn't be any poor people any more.

PMFJI - I'm a victim of red-tape way more than I'd like, working for Uncle Sam, and I strongly dislike the over-use of it, but there is a point to that gov't distribution and check-signing. If you're not extremely careful, there are a zillion people out there that will try to cheat and bilk the system for all they can get out of it at the expense of other poor and all taxpayers.

So, the problem is finding a secure delivery system for the funding - and that's no easy matter.