FINALLY! Totally Objective Journalism!

Just kidding. 

The new numbers on poverty in America dropped, and they were pretty startling: under Donald Trump, child poverty has dropped to the lowest level in recorded history. 

The news, of course, was not exactly shouted from the rooftops, although the Washington Post Editorial Board did do a great Op/Ed on the foolishness of complaints that the United States doesn’t spend enough money to fight poverty. It may be that Bezos hasn’t been able to steer the paper’s news section toward the center, but the Editorial Board is indeed moving right. 

Instead, to the extent we got reporting on the news, it was framed to look as negative as possible. 

pic.twitter.com/zsYwG0WwjM

— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) September 16, 2026

By now, none of this is surprising. News is always and almost everywhere framed to make Democrats look good and Republicans look like ogres. The poverty rate under Biden falls a bit, and it shows Biden is an economic genius; the poverty rate falls under Donald Trump, as it did significantly in both his terms, and he is setting the country up for dystopia. 

During the Biden years, the pattern was taken to absurd lengths, making the press coverage during the Obama years almost look hostile to the former president. As Democrat policies get more and more damaging, the media goes to ever greater lengths to make them look good, and to invert reality. 

What made the Washington Post editorial so interesting, as well as the piece linked in the X post below, is that the official poverty rate grossly overstates the actual poverty rate in the country, and it’s not even close. 

https://t.co/chOqjequkG

— Dominic Pino (@DominicJPino) September 16, 2026

Poverty, you see, is calculated based on cash income, and if you include non-cash support and tax credits, which actually are cash handed out to the people who get them, poverty almost disappears. Or, at least, it should, because we spend $35,000 in anti-poverty spending per person in that category. In a household that adds up to some serious spending. 

Using the Census Bureau’s official poverty count, that anti-poverty spending comes out to $35,000 in annual expenditures for every person in poverty, or $181,000 per family in poverty. Economist Milton Friedman, after doing a similar calculation for a 1978 lecture, argued that if that money were actually making it to people in poverty, they’d be among the rich.

So where is the money going? Part of it is bureaucratic churn. A 2024 report from the Manhattan Institute estimated that about 20 percent of social welfare spending is “robbing Peter to pay Peter” — i.e., returning to people money that the government took from them in taxes in the same year. The web of overlapping anti-poverty programs is difficult for people to navigate and contributes to losses from inefficiency.

Scope creep is another problem. Programs once reserved for the truly poor and disabled have steadily broadened their qualification criteria. Obamacare expanded Medicaid, for example, to cover able-bodied, working-age adults. Because the federal government more generously subsidizes enrollees under the ACA expansion, the traditional Medicaid population can be crowded out of access to timely, high-quality care. Beyond Medicaid, about three-quarters of school lunches are now fully or partially subsidized.

Of course, a lot of that money is frittered away, blown on bureaucracy, laundered through NGOs, or given to people who really should not be eligible in the first place. The problem is not that the Pentagon is sucking down all the resources—we spend less as a percentage of GDP on defense by far than we did during the Cold War, or, for that matter, during most of modern American history. And as a percent of government spending, the numbers are historically pretty low. 

Defense is only 13 percent of federal spending, which is a near-historic low since 1900. In 1960, for instance, it was about 50 percent of all federal spending. Under Obama, it was 20-25 percent of federal spending. As a percentage of GDP, we are also near the lowest point since World War II. 

In other words, the problem isn’t that the government is too focused on defense spending or that we don’t spend enough on fighting poverty; neither of those claims is remotely true. It’s that what we spend is spent badly, and that the scope of the problem is grossly overstated. 

If we took the money we spend on benefits to people in poverty and just handed it straight to the recipients, most of them would fit firmly in the lower-middle class, and an intact family of four would rise to the upper-middle class, since their children would be getting an income of about $35,000 each as well. 

When conservatives say that the problem is not that we don’t spend enough, but that what we spend goes down a rat hole, that’s not just a talking point. It is an objective fact. The reason most people don’t believe it is that there is a massive industry built on farming poverty and harvesting the dollars, and Pravda Media is an accessory to the grift. 

As with homelessness, the poverty industrial complex benefits mightily from the reality or perception of poverty, so we get lots of poverty pimping. The pool of money to be dipped into is astronomical — well over a trillion dollars — and that buys a lot of propaganda along with a nice lifestyle for the people enjoying the grift. 

With all that said, Trump’s economy, for all its flaws, is dragging people out of poverty, which is a good thing for everybody but the grifters. 

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