Three interesting pieces of data that help this discussion: 1) To combat extreme poverty, a lot of great studies show that giving direct cash is better than gi

Three interesting pieces of data that help this discussion: 1) To combat extreme poverty, a lot of great studies show that giving direct cash is better than giving non-profit services. http://www.economist.com/news/international/21588385-giving-money-directly-poor-people-works-surprisingly-well-it-cannot-deal http://www.economist.com/news/international/21588385-giving-... 2) Instead of expanding the welfare state, it's probably better that we expand the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) which has HUGE support on both sides of the aisle. It was first created by Milton Friedman and is one of the only things that is a policy that we predicted would be successful and became hugely successful. The issue is that each party in the United States has found that public opinion polling finds that "SNAP" or other parts of the federal government are hugely popular compared to the wonky sounding EITC. 3) Some studies also show that despite poverty, human beings will also forgo basic necessities (as determined by the state) and buy things like smartphones, text messaging plans, etc. All in all, really, what we should be doing is likely cash infusions to the extremely poor, expanding EITC (which somewhat supports the article), and keeping the important parts of the state alive, e.g. healthy food, early childhood pre-school, etc.