Scratching By: How Government Creates Poverty as We Know It

Governments—local, state, and federal—spend a lot of time wringing their hands about the plight of the urban poor. Look around any government agency and you’ll never fail to find
some know-it-all with a suit and a nameplate on his desk who has just the right government program to eliminate or ameliorate, or at least
contain, the worst aspects of grinding
poverty in American cities—especially as experienced by black people, immigrants,
people with disabilities, and everyone else marked for the special observation and solicitude of the state bureaucracy. Depending on the bureaucrat’s frame of mind, his pet programs might focus on doling out conditional
charity to “deserving” poor people, or putting
more “at-risk” poor people under the surveillance of social workers and medical experts, or beating up recalcitrant poor people and locking them in cages for several years.