So What’s Obama’s Excuse?

From President Obama’s memorial service speech in Dallas for dead policemen:

“As a society, . . . [w]e allow poverty to fester so that entire neighborhoods offer no prospect for gainful employment.”

“Who’s the “we” there, pal?  It sure isn’t the American citizens and voters,” asks and answers Francis Menton in Manhattan Contrarian.

I would say that the American citizens and voters have shown great, even unbelievable, generosity in approving, through their elected representatives, some $1 trillion per year of funding for government programs supposed to combat poverty.  About two-thirds of the spending is done by the federal government, all of it under your direct control for the past seven and a half years.  That’s about $5 trillion of federal “anti-poverty” spending in the last 7+ years on your watch by federal bureaucracies answering to you.  With any minimally competent allocation of these funds, that sum should have been far more than sufficient to eradicate poverty once and for all.  But in fact, on your watch, poverty as measured by your own Census Bureau hasn’t even gone down at all, not even by a little.  And as the poverty rate has stayed about the same and the population has grown, the absolute number of people deemed “in poverty” has actually increased.  Don’t try to blame this on us.  We put you in charge, and we gave you way more than enough money to do the job.  What is your excuse?