A couple of notes on poverty
One of the flashpoint issues of the 1965 Watts riot was the lack of a hospital in that inner-city LA district. As a result of the riots, Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital was built. Its recent failures of care and performance have made headlines; to make the headlines go away, the hospital has been shut down rather than being fixed. Now, Watts finds itself back in 1965 again.
Meanwhile, half of the poor people in this country eligible for food stamps aren't receiving them.
Stories like this will continue to escalate as long as a big portion of our society continues to buy into the lie that helping the poor is somehow wrong.