Daily Inspiration Quote by P. J. O'Rourke

O'Rourke’s line lands like a barstool punchline with a policy brief hidden inside it: a neat, irritatingly confident refusal of the simplest fix. The phrasing matters. “Get rid of” frames poverty as a stain you can scrub out with a single tool. “By giving people money” turns redistribution into a cartoon version of itself, as if anti-poverty efforts amount to tossing cash at strangers and hoping virtue trickles down.

The intent is provocation. O’Rourke, a libertarian-leaning journalist with a satirist’s ear for overstatement, compresses a sprawling debate into a sentence designed to make do-gooders look naive and bureaucrats look self-important. The subtext isn’t that money is useless; it’s that cash transfers alone won’t reliably change the conditions that produce poverty: incentives, education, family stability, addiction, neighborhood effects, labor markets, policy traps that punish earning more. He’s arguing against the comforting fantasy that compassion can be mechanized.

Context sharpens the edge. O’Rourke came up in late-20th-century American fights over welfare, the Great Society’s legacy, and a growing skepticism about government competence. His audience is primed to suspect that programs become permanent and that “help” can harden into dependency or institutional self-preservation.

It works because it’s both true and incomplete. You can’t “get rid of” poverty with a one-time check, but you can blunt it, stabilize families, buy time, and expand choices. The line’s power is its cynicism; its weakness is that it smuggles in an all-or-nothing standard that few real policies claim to meet.