The Rogers Anti-poverty plan... :-)

1. We need to recognize that America suffers largely from a problem of behavioral poverty, not material hardship. With behavioral poverty, there's a breakdown in the values and conduct that lead to the formation of healthy families, stable personalities, and self-sufficiency. This includes bad work ethic and dependency, lack of educational goals, inability or unwillingness to control one’s children, increased single parenthood and illegitimacy, criminal activity, and drug and alcohol abuse. The problem of the traditional welfare state is that prolific spending intended to alleviate material poverty has led to an increase in behavioral poverty.
2. Welfare policy should identify the collapse of marriage as the principal cause of poverty and welfare dependence in the United States. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (God rest his soul) was writing about this in the 1960's, and he was called every name in the book because of it. Let's face it, rhe erosion of marriage is both the predominant cause of child poverty and welfare dependence and a major factor in most of America’s social problems generally.
3. Welfare policy should end the practice of permissive entitlement and should seek instead to move individuals toward self-sufficiency, learning from the success of the 1996 welfare reform. The old welfare system rewarded non-work and non-marriage. By promoting dependence and illegitimacy, it increased poverty, crime, and a host of social ills. Since 1996 when TANF was passed, the rates of child poverty and welfare dependence have gone down, and employment among single mothers has gone up. We need to strengthen the work requirements and their enforcement by also requiring able-bodied non-elderly adults receiving food stamps and public housing to perform community service work, supervised job search, or training as a condition of receiving aid since food stamps and public housing were left out on TANF in '96.