"Misleading Words Part II"

"This is not just a question of semantics. The whole future of the welfare state depends on how poverty is defined. "The poor" are the human shields behind whom advocates of ever bigger spending for ever bigger government advance toward their goal.

If poverty meant what most people think of as poverty -- people "ill-clad, ill-housed, and ill-nourished," in Franklin D. Roosevelt's phrase -- there would not be nearly enough people in poverty today to justify the vastly expanded powers and runaway spending of the federal government."