Chuck Roger - Government-run, taxpayer-funded, anti-poverty programs do not work

Chuck Roger, in his Clear Thinking, The Blog, has an interesting post on the ineffectiveness of government anti-poverty programs.  He notes that government anti-poverty spending has increased by 89% in the last decade, 2000 to 2010.  Looking at the graph of anti-poverty spending as a percent of GDP, back in 1962 it was 0.5% of GDP, but is now 4.4% of GDP, which is almost a 9 times increase in the redistribution of income from taxpayers to welfare recipients in that time.  The average American is giving up $4800 a year to fund these anti-poverty programs.  The spending on food stamps has increased by a factor of three in the last 10 years. 

Despite all of this effort, the number of those in "poverty" had not changed much over the years.  Recently, due to the mostly government-induced and the government-prolonged recession, the number of people in poverty has increased.  Of course, most of the people in poverty under normal circumstances are the young who are students or in their first jobs.  Many still live with their parents.  Until we get rid of the young, we will always have similar numbers of people in "poverty" as we do now.  The need for anti-poverty programs is mostly a fraud.  The idea that government should and can effectively provide anti-poverty help is entirely a fraud.

Chuck Roger: "Leader with a Plan' Invites a Health Care Nightmare

Chuck Roger wrote a well-done post on American Thinker way back on 6 June 2010. Obama's man to head up the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is the Harvard professor Donald Berwick. Berwick is a romantic about the British National Health System (NHS), for which he gushes love. He also has this to say about us in Roger's words:

The American people are too simple to choose from "an array of products" in "a system as massive and complex as health care. That is for leaders to do."

Roger goes on to characterize the British NHS as:

The amorous Dr. Berwick wants American health care to mimic the NHS, which, according to Cato Institute's Michael Tanner, has three-quarters of a million patients waiting to enter hospitals. The U.K. had hoped to achieve a wait time of less than eighteen weeks by 2008. The deadline now passed, the NHS hopes to improve on an abysmal 30 to 50 percent of patients seeing specialists within eighteen weeks. Shockingly, each year, 50,000 queued-up NHS patients become too sick to undergo what might have been life-saving surgeries.

In early 2009, at one hospital alone, Britain's Healthcare Commission reported 1,200 deaths attributable to "appalling standards of care," "patients left for hours in soiled bedclothes," unattended injured people "covered in blood and without pain relief," and patients receiving wrong or no medication. Also in 2009, London's Daily Telegraph documented nearly 400 deaths a year at two hospitals that lacked "basic nursing skills" and made a habit of parking untreated patients in emergency areas for ten hours.

This is how Obama and Berwick want the American health care system to work and they actually think this is an improvement.  They are both otherworldly aliens.  Remember that 50,000 NHS patients a year never get the chance to have surgeries they have long waited for because their condition deteriorated too much during the wait.  The population in the United States is about 5 times that of the United Kingdom.  The proportional number of fatal waits in the U.S. would be 250,000 people a year.  Do you want one of those people to be you or someone you love?

Of course Berwick and Obama figure that is just another dumb American dying who is incapable of managing his own health care choices.  Besides, fewer people is good for the environment according to numerous of Obama's chosen advisers.