1. As Ben Shapiro recently noted, we have spent trillions of dollars over the past 50 years and have reduced US poverty by approximately zero.

   With its track record, how does anyone still believe that the federal government can actually accomplish a task?

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   1. There’s good reason to believe it never was the goal of the Federal government to accomplish that task. If they succeeded, the parasites (bureaucrats) in the agency would be out of a job. That can’t be tolerated.
      So the goal of this, and all other, government efforts is first and foremost to perpetuate and grow the program. If it does something positive for the citizens with real jobs, that’s ok so long as it does not get in the way with the primary goal of providing jobs for the normally unemployable.

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   2. (Sorry for the long reply; there’s a fair bit of background info necessary for my point.)

      Federal Poverty Level (FPL) is a hard dollar amount per year; if you make less than [FPL], you are considered “in poverty” no matter what your standard of living is.

      In the 48 contiguous states, currently, it’s $12,880 for one person and $4,640 for each additional person in the household. Add that up, and that’s FPL for your household. (If you have a lot of children, you might be surprised how close FPL is to your actual income, especially in states where prevailing wages are relatively low.) When looking at an application for public benefits — be it Medicaid/Medicare, SNAP, TANF, or dozens of others — they look at income as a percentage of FPL; the qualification guidelines use phrasing like “less than 125% FPL” or “<185% FPL", and every program has different guidelines (IIRC, a few go all the way up to 300% FPL).

      The problem is, the FPL's hard dollar amount is a function of the nation-wide Consumer Price Index (CPI), and as such it fluctuates year-to-year and is not adjusted for local or personal costs or standards of living in the “lower 48”. (Hawai’i and Alaska have their own numbers reflecting their localized, significantly-higher price indices.)

      All that is to say: since prevailing wages and supply-and-demand determine prices, and FPL is based on prices, if you’re in the bottom 5-10% of earners, your income is probably below FPL — again, irrespective of your personal standard of living. In states with low overall costs of living and/or if you have a lot of children, you might bring in plenty to live comfortably but still be considered “in poverty”.

      And now we get to the meat of the issue: Even if we raise the income and give out public benefits for everyone in the U.S. so that every single person can afford to house, clothe, and feed themselves today, prices will quickly adjust for minimum wages, government money, and supply-and-demand. That inflation will raise the CPI, which in turn will raise FPL for next year.

      Put simply, there will always be a “bottom 5-10%” that lives “below the poverty level”. Taxing wealthy people or businesses might help fund public benefits for a while, but poverty has a very specific federal definition that has nothing at all to do with tax revenues and cannot be eliminated that way.

      There’s no “winning the War on Poverty” without getting rid of that income inequality, and the only way to do that is to centrally fix prices lower than the market can bear (artificially control the CPI) and centrally fix wages so everyone makes the same amount no matter what they do (or don’t do) or what they accomplish (or don’t accomplish).

      There’s a name for an economic system in which the government centrally fixes prices and wages, production costs and realities be damned. It’s called “Socialism”.

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2. People who don’t understand economics think that all the money used was just stuck in the fuel tank and burned. It all went to businesses/industries to design/build/lease etc. the rocket and facilities. All that gets taxes paid on it and money into the pockets of all sorts of workers.

   So in reality, they just want his money to be taken directly by the gov’t and put into the hands of politicians and bureaucrats instead of directly to the people.

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3. Schiff has just summed up why we’ve been losing the space race steadily over the past decades.

   Unintentionally, of course, but he did all the same.

   Stupid rat-faced prick.

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4. He didn’t even launch himself into LEO. Details, details.

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5. I’m a little confused. Isn’t it congress who pass the tax laws full of loopholes that allow companies like Amazon to avoid paying taxes?

   So, if Amazon isn’t paying its “fair share”, isn’t it Congress’ job to pass legislation to close the loopholes they’re using to avoid paying taxes?

   Oh…wait…if congress closes the loopholes, that means they and their cronies will have to start paying taxes too. They can’t very well pass tax laws that only apply to members of congress, their families and business associates, now can they?

   So, instead, they’ll just try to vilify “unapproved” companies and people who take advantage of the tax loopholes that they put in the system to keep themselves from having to pay taxes on anything other than the measly $200k in salary they get.

   In other words, Schiff is being is usual hypocritical, sleazy self.

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6. Schiff needs to see this:
   https://youtu.be/RWsx1X8PV_A

   Heck, everyone needs to see this.

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   1. What is it? Please, take a moment and a handful of characters to give a guy a heads-up of what you want him to watch.

      (And no, I’m not going to just click to see for myself, on a phone with a limited data plan, at work.)

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      1. Sorry, Boris. Good advice.
         It’s Milton Friedman telling Phil Donahue he’s an idiot when it comes to economics.

         It destroys the leftist narrative that wealth should be distributed instead of used

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         1. Thanks much!

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7. Another “intelligent being” showing us just how bleep bleepin stupid it really is. Last I knew it was up to the individual to “lift them out of poverty”. Btw shifty- how much of YOUR money have you used to fight poverty??

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8. I’ll second Rick – but I’d add if they hadn’t wasted so much of our tax money on their friends, think of what could’ve been done. For example, how many billions were spent on non functioning Obamacare websites? All of it lining pockets.

   Far as ‘Fair share’ goes; if you didn’t know it was bullshit before, when Trump’s tax plan capped real estate tax writeoffs, you’d know if from the wailing and grinding of teeth. All it did was give it stiff and dry to those blue state rich people.

   I’m surprised it hasn’t quietly vanished from the tax code.

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