Watching Republicans try to come up with a plan to fight poverty is like watching a rock plan to learn how to swim. The entire enterprise is doomed from the start.

Venezuela, one of the world’s least successful nations, is seriously fucked. How much more fucked is Venzuela since the last time we told you how fucked Venzuela is?

Kids who grow up poor have a better chance of one day not being poor if they grow up neighborhoods where everyone isn’t poor. But in some cities, affordable housing crises are making that impossible. It’s a quandary.

For the “It’s Expensive to Be Poor” file: The poorest people in the world pay more of their income to get clean water than anyone else.

At the end of March, 22 states will begin imposing work requirements on people who want food stamps. Hundreds of thousands of people will likely lose their food aid.

If you look very closely at America, you can see the poor physically growing apart from the rich, like a polar bear drifting out to sea on a broken chunk of ice.

Jeb Bush, whose handlers should be fired for failing to heroically leap in front of the photographer before this stunningly Shining-like photo above was snapped on Tuesday, has shifted his campaign into movie villain mode. His new welfare plan calls for the total elimination of SNAP, the federal food stamps program.

During this election season, you will hear candidates argue about lots of things. Only two things are really important.

For the poorest people in the country, a huge portion of their income is being consumed by shit.

In 2013, one in five American children officially lived in poverty. Black children have the worst luck of all.

People forget today that George W. Bush first ran for president as a “compassionate conservative” because it was novel to do so: Most conservatives openly acknowledged that they were pricks by 2000. Like George’s brother Jeb, who wrote in 1995 of wanting society to attach a “sense of ridicule” to single parenting.

Who ruined our economy, Bush or Obama? Trick question! The economy’s never been better, for investors and rentiers. And it’s never getting better for everybody else, including the half of Americans who just told the U.S. government they’d be fucked if they needed to come up with $400, like, now.

The fastest way to fight poverty is to redirect money from higher-income to lower-income people. In the meantime, behavioral scientists have some tips on how the present system can do a better job of helping the poor.

The United States is one of the most effective reverse-Robin Hood economies in human history. But you may wonder: Could its redistribution of wealth from the impoverished to the rich be more efficient? Of course it can, with inspiration from that incubator of all great American innovations, Kansas.

Access to food stamps and other government anti-poverty programs is often used as a political football. This amounts to playing with human lives. Each week, we are bringing you true stories from Americans who receive public assistance. Here are your fellow citizens speaking about their own lives.

“Republicans’ emphasis on poorer and working-class Americans now represents a shift from the party’s longstanding focus on business owners and ‘job creators’ as the drivers of economic opportunity. This is intentional, Republican operatives said.” Really? Huh.

More than one in four Americans—many of them employed—receive some type of government anti-poverty assistance. We are bringing you their stories. Today, seven different experiences from people in seven different states.