Wil Wilkinson writes:
One of the leading causes of poverty in America is decades of ineffective government anti-poverty policy.
Huh. I didn't know serious people actually believed that.
Update: It occurs to me that I should say a bit more on this. In short, serious folks don't believe that, and I'm rather surprised to see Wil blithely assert it. Whatever relevance Charles Murray's Losing Ground thesis once had (and I'm unconvinced it ever got much right), it's long since become a relic of another age, and a radically different welfare state.
Folks who are actually interested in exploring the roots of poverty should check out John Iceland's Poverty In America, an almost annoyingly non-ideological overview of the research from the former head of the U.S. Census Bureau's poverty and health statistics department. The actual causes of poverty are rather complicated, of course, and range from culture to lack of good jobs (particularly in regions of concentrated impoverishment) to credit card debt to inequality to lack of political will to drug abuse to family structure to simple bad luck. Medicaid, so far as I know, has never been convincingly fingered. Relatedly, I wrote a feature back in September on the political history of poverty, the various forces contributing to the current paralysis, and what a new war on poverty would look like. Folks should read it.