For those who haven't noticed, poverty is at virtually the same percentage today as it was when President Johnson started the War on Poverty, even though we have spent $20 trillion since then to eradicate poverty, the equivalent of our entire national debt. It has not worked. Your belief that it will is the illusion.

Your veiled contention that those who recognize this failure do not care about those in need is cynical and wrong. We want to help those in true need, but by means that are truly effective, not simply a means to ongoing political power. We also want to motivate and educate those who are not in true need but are in poverty due to their own poor choices, while you sadly pretend such people do not exist as a distinct class of the poor, and are to be treated exactly as those in true need are. That is why you fail to eradicate poverty. If enough people ever recognize this instead of voting for handouts that keep them in the grip of poverty, it is why you will fail politically.