This is our quote of the day from the Economist Magazine.

Charles Murray warned of this in his epic book “Losing Ground” more than four decades ago: giving money to people for not working is a losing proposition:

Was his welfare state necessary, or would poverty have fallen anyway? [Thomas] Sowell has repeatedly argued that the drop began before the mid-1960s…

[F]rom 1939 to 1963 the poverty rate fell by about 29 percentage points. Over the following 60 years it only dropped by around 16 more. Moreover, the authors go on to examine the causes of America’s shrinking cohort of poor people. Before the 1960s, they find, poverty fell because people earned more money, while few got more from the state…

By the 1970s close to 30% of black Americans were dependent on the government for at least half of their income, for instance. A country that had once enabled its citizens to escape poverty by working hard turned into one that reduced poverty by writing them cheques…

[T]he war on poverty involved a gigantic trade-off. Trillions of dollars of federal money may have reduced deprivation while also blunting individuals’ incentives to better their own lot.