I thought the point was that it was not level of poverty that was the problem but the level of inequality... These are of course related, but I would assume th

I thought the point was that it was not level of poverty that was the problem but the level of inequality... These are of course related, but I would assume that the causality runs from inequality causing poverty rather than the other way around. Giving people with no or little power a bit more money is not going to allow them to magically take control of their situation. If somebody is flat broke and struggling to pay the bills, giving them a little bit more money may improve their economic situation in the short term, but over the long term with more people having some disposable income, supply and demand will increase prices and good old inflation will balance things out. If you ensure that people have more equal opportunities by improving access to education, improving access to services independent of location and remove barriers based on sex, race religion health care etc (look I don't have the answers to this) then at least a persons has a similar chance to everybody else to achieve their goals in life. Trying to solve social problems by just moving money around is a very simplistic solution and can only ever work for simple problems. Inequality is a very complex problem with origins based in history and human nature. If you want everybody to have the same chance to achieve their personal goals then you have to give them the same baseline to start from, and only a small part of that is how much money they have in their pocket.