A start would be, not only a national chid care program but also a national health insurance plan with a sort of sliding scale. The poorer one is the sicker they are lible to become, the same goes for the kids, which ends up as a burden on the state, the present health care system, the local ecomomies & end's up effecting us all. But this would be a career stopper for the political rascal that dared put forth this issue. The AMA, the insurance industry, the Hospital networks & others would be in an uproar, even though it would benifit the nation as a whole as well as help to solve the poverty issue.
Dickey posted above a track of poverty from the 50's onward. If one were to add on the left out factors & put them into the same equation I would bet that the raise & fall of the true levels would closely follow the same rise & fall levels of the social programs that previously dealt with poverty but ended up cut or scaled back. Me belief is that those programs did work, had made a very big dents in the poverty levels. I know that growing up & taking advantage of the available programs at that time made a world of difference for the whole community. Today without those programs I believe that these same communities are dying without them. The drug & alcohol abuse, the crime rate, infant mortality rate, child pregnancies, homelessness rates & the rate of the poor youth signing up to fight wars for lack of better employment are shyrocketing while education levels are dropping, the level of health care is disappearing, the prisons systems are bursting at the seams and it seems to me that the nation's economy benifits from this situation. The benifits include an undereducated labor force destained to low competive wages along with a labor force that gets no health insurance & their costs get passsed on for the rest to subsidize. What also comes of this is a class of people that will vote as manipulated by their needs for survival dictate. They cost very little to maintain & when they do contribute they put up more than their fair share of the (tax) burden. My belief is that as the gap between the poor & the rich grow wider that this will eventually suck in & include the working classes also. The tendency to tip the scales so that the rich & powerful will, if not already, become a very small elite with control over a much poorer & huge percentage of the population. This divide is happening today & will continue with more becoming poorer unless there's a change in policy. It seems to me that the war on poverty is an issue that overlaps & it'll take more than just money, education & programs, hope, values & internal incentive, that won't be enough. There's also, as I said above, the perception of the poor by not only themselves but by society as a whole. Without a change in the national image of the underclass they will stay & remain as the underclass forever being blamed for their situation as their own fault. Instead we should be having a national attitude that sees this as every one's problem & something that everyone needs to proudly kick in with a hand to surrmount what should become a national achievment& goal. But then there are those that say let 'em eat cake, they need to pull themselves up by their boot staps when they've no boots & those that say the bastards are just lazy.

Barry