When the programs that comprised the War on Poverty were launched in the 1960s, they were supposed to be temporary means of support to help Americans get their economic footing underneath them. These programs were supposed to last for 10 or 20 years, max. That was what we were told; that was what our tax dollars were going to stimulate.

Instead, the programs have grown substantially, using your hard-earned money to institutionalize what was to be temporary. It is not heartless to want to do away with programs that do not work; what is heartless is our tolerance of the generational poverty we see in every part of this country. What is heartless is accepting an approach that promises but does not deliver. We make minimal progress compared to what is possible if we switched the responsibility away form each in one which we can change, in one community after another. approach to the endless economic struggles of our neighbors.

A large portion of federal, state, and local tax dollars are taken from you and spent on programs that are not even supposed to be needed any more. Worse yet, they don’t work.

Millions of people work for government and human service nonprofit agencies, making hundreds of billions of dollars — your money. And all this happens while an increasing number of Americans struggle to make it through the day. Unfortunately, thousands do not make it, murdered amidst the violence that is disproportionately higher in low-income neighborhoods or dying from health issues never diagnosed or found too late because there is such little access to basic preventive care — 60 years after the war on poverty was supposed to solve these very problems.

It’s time for a revolution

Part of the definition of the word, revolution, includes: activity or movement designed to effect fundamental changes in the socioeconomic situation.

To eradicate poverty, it turns out, we need to eradicate our current approach to it. The poverty industrial complex — composed of people and organizations in every sector, including nonprofit and government employees and programs — must be eradicated along with the poverty it has been unable to solve.

Accountability must be front and center, and your role is to hold yourself and others accountable. It’s your tax dollars and your charitable donations being spent. If the people charged with spending them cannot show you the outcomes they promised when taking them, they should stop getting your money.

That’s the only sane response to the past nine decades of failed efforts. And make no mistake, our efforts have failed, no matter how good they felt or the few examples of success that are paraded in front of us at endless galas or highlighted on occasion on television or in the newspaper. The majority of Americans living in poverty are in it for a lifetime, as are their children and grandchildren.

If that seems harsh, know that what is actually harsh is not being able to walk out your front door without the risk of becoming a homicide victim. What’s harsh is having a life expectancy at birth that is 30 years less than that of your neighbor a few miles up the road. If you are born in some parts of our nation’s capital, for example, your life expectancy is 93 years. If you are born in other parts of our nation’s capital, your life expectancy is 62 years. The reason is poverty – having scarcity and uncertainty as your daily modus operandi.

It’s time for wholesale changes in how we approach it.

The good news

is that we are the solution, each of us. We do not have to rely on government or anyone else to do what we can do in our own communities. And you can start here.