What's the best way to help poor people escape poverty?

Progressives and conservatives have very different answers to this question.

But before we explore those answers, let's agree on this.

Both progressives and conservatives believe that the government has a moral obligation to help those who

through bad luck or unfortunate circumstances can't help themselves.

Here's what a conservative icon Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek

said on the subject. There is no reason why in a society that has reached the general level of

wealth hours has attained. The first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all.

Some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work.

Whatever the media might tell you, there isn't a conservative out there who would not agree with

Hayek's statement. As I've documented in my book, Who Really Cares? When it comes to philanthropy

and charitable giving, conservatives actually outgive progressives by a lot.

Where the two sides disagree is on the role the government plays, not in protecting the poor from

poverty, but in lifting them out of it. Here's the disturbing piece of data.

On balance, since President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty programs came fully online in 1966,

the poverty rate in America has hardly budged. That rate, as computed by the United States

government, was 14.7% in 1966. And today, it's 13.5%. The rate has fluctuated a few points

up and down over the decades. The net result is just one percentage point of progress.

And this is after the government has spent over $20 trillion on poverty relief programs,

$20 trillion. The current size of the US debt and the needle has barely moved.

Now it's true that the official poverty rate doesn't measure consumption. Certainly poor people

today have many more things than poor people did in 1970. Across all income levels, including the

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