To help poor people, give them money

It is a fact, that countries really flourished (USA, Germany, other countries) with a bigger part of the society in the middle class and having a better living and education, when those countries managed to bring better income also to working-class people.

Today's wealth in the US is for a big part because of the flourishing middle-class of the country shortly after the 2nd World-war. The same holds for Germany and other countries.

Today, all over the world, the income diverts and education already is going down for normal people in many countries. Middle classes are melting away.

Wealth of a society is not only to be measured by the wealthiest people in the society, but by the wealth of the middle class (and worker) people.

Today, we waste the wealth created after the war and give it away to the Everybody should see this film: Inequality for All [1] that shows, the connections, that many are just ignoring today.

To my opinion, to help poor people, raise wages of workers in all the world (thus making an end with a Globalization that just helps the rich).

By raising the wages, you will not have people that just live on welfare, but that can be proud again for their work they do.

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2215151/

Time after time, when I've helped family members with cash, it winds up getting wasted horribly and helping them less than it hurt me to give it to them. When I help them with what they need, their situation improves.

And logically, if the poor as a group were good with money, they wouldn't be poor.

Yet the article asks me to abandon reason and experience because there's some "a growing body of evidence" somewhere out there which are not provided by the article.

It's generally considered that you either want to expand the current, highly convoluted system, or that you loathe welfare entirely as a matter of principle.

I would never give them cash. While you certainly cited all sorts of needs; this is not hard and runs along the lines of "for the children, no one is against children are they?" it doesn't solve the problem.

There are two categories than need help and both can be helped the same way. First are the truly poor, they just cannot get past Go. Second are those whose decisions are making or keeping them poor. This usually involves getting tied in revolving credit, auto loans, lottery, and monthlies. Catastrophic causes that lead to the poor house need to be treated wholly separately; medical and death.

So give them money the same way food stamps are administered. They are provided an allowance for specific expenditures. This cannot be converted to cash. No system is too complex to implement, the government already manages thousands of assistance programs and sends out tens if not hundreds of millions of checks for such each month.

Basically the idea is to create purchasing groups which have similar expenses. Within these an amount is contributed monthly upto a maximum held for paying such expenses at approved retailers, service providers, etc. This covers the need side as well as hopefully teaches management of funds.

Cash cannot be tracked, it can also be easily stolen, meaning its near impossible to verify it used as intended nor determining if the assistance is the proper type.

And who cares if you think my argument should automatically be "disqualified" because it doesn't match your politics.