Madam Defarge's War On Poverty

We're hearing a lot about how our taxes and social compacts need to help the "less fortunate" among us. Just who are these people? Well, here's the Census data on poverty. Assuming, perhaps rashly, that unencumbered adults can take care of themselves, let's look at families below the poverty line.

Married parents: 5.8% of all married families live in poverty
Single moms: 29.9% of all single mother families live in poverty
Single dads: 16.9% of all single father families live in poverty

How about total numbers of such families?
Married parents: 3.4M
Single moms: 4.4M
Single dads: 0.9M

Single moms make up more than half of all families living in poverty. So, by percentages and total numbers, it's reasonable to say that the "less fortunate" can be characterized as single moms. If our overall poverty rate was 5-6%, I'd think we'd be pretty happy with that.

So what's the plan here? As far as I can tell from the rhetoric, there's no longer any talk of a War on Poverty or any grand strategy, there's only financial envy and a desire to redistribute income. It's like we've given up on the whole "help the poor escape poverty" thing and have settled for making them our national housepets, paid for by "the rich". There's certainly no indication that our social programs have done anything at all to prevent the condition that leads to poverty more than any other. In fact, we can't even speak of it in polite company for fear of being labeled a prude.

Solving a problem you can't even discuss seems like a fool's errand to me.

Perhaps we should nominate Madam Defarge for director of Health and Human Services since we seem more interested in revenge than solving the problem. Assuming we can even bring ourselves to admit the real problem in the first place.