Gammon's Black Holes

In 1968, the poverty rate in the US was 12.8%. Since then, we have introduced or vastly expanded the following:

food stamps
job training courses
community development block grants
urban redevelopment schemes
medicaid
aid to families with dependent children (AFDC)
social security disability income
section 8 housing grants
emergency assistance to needy families with children
college scholarship aid
free and reduced price lunches
child care
housing projects
head start

Currently, the poverty rate is around 12.3%. More importantly, most of our cities have become unlivable, so that most college-educated families simply do not live within the city borders of Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Newark, etc. More programs, worse results.

Dr. Max Gammon was a British physician who noticed that although government spent significantly more on health care than it had previously in the 1960s, the National Health Service didn't seem any better for it. After an extensive study of the British system of socialized medicine, Gammon formulated his law: "In a bureaucratic system, increase in expenditure will be matched by fall in production...such systems will act rather like 'black holes,' in the economic universe, simultaneously sucking in resources, and shrinking in terms of emitted production."