This is the Cater Daily Podcast for Wednesday, April 15, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown. Federal and state governments have spent more than $19 trillion

fighting poverty and it's not clear what that money is

accomplished. Michael Tanner is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute on March

26th he spoke at the Cato event can we end poverty and provided some insight

on government welfare programs and whether private

charitable efforts could be a better alternative.

Federal government alone spends $686 billion last year financing these programs and state and local governments

contribute another 292 billion dollars. So we're up to a trillion dollars

just under that which is real money so it's hard to see that

we're not spending money fighting poverty. Now we really should keep this in

perspective because this is not just about money being spent.

And if you really want to get into where, you know, we spend money in Washington,

you know, the money we spend on poverty as real as it is

pales in comparison to the amount of welfare we spend on senior citizens in terms of Social

Security and Medicare over and above what they pay in to the programs.

There's a huge amount of poverty for the relatively affluent elderly.

Corporate welfare is a substantial amount, over $100 billion, according to Cato's estimates,

all of which should be done away with.

And then of course there's welfare tucked into the military and defense and

homeless security budgets.

We don't know exactly how much it is.

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