Given that, do you toss the whole idea or do you think it could work in places like Kenya and the United States?
It's too easy for someone to say "Group X needs additional support for Reason Y" and end up with something just as expensive and complex as what we have now. I know, because I've managed to bait people on both the left and the right into doing it for different values of X and Y.
By "correct implementation", I mean one that replaces all welfare, social security, and probably some parts of the tax code. Healthcare maybe you can get away with treating separately.
I don’t know enough about Kenya to say one way or the other.
As you suggest, it's difficult to imagine this shoehorned in with the tangle of programs administered by multiple agencies.
You can't expect a microeconomics proposal to solve an international political crisis.
> someone gave you enough money to eat, that would be a solution regardless of how corrupt your government.
is obviously not a solution. NK is the most extreme example, but there are others which are less extreme and don't rise to the level of "international political crisis."
Looks like they only paid $90 for the assassination (and materials I guess)).
Let's work through an example.
North Korea is one of the poorest countries in the world, and many people starve there every year. It's also a ruthlessly oppressive totalitarian state; the government decides who can enter and leave the country. The government also runs the entire economy, and directs most of it toward military spending. This is all because the country is essentially under the total control of a single person whose father and grand father decided they like things this way, and the geopolitical situation happened to work out in their favor from 1950 to the present.
Suppose you've got an infinite pile of money to give to North Koreans to solve their problems with not having enough food to eat. It's illegal for you to enter that country without permission and illegal for the North Koreans to accept money from foreigners. So how do you give them the money?
Let's assume you can give them the money; that you have a big cargo plane you can fly over North Korea and can throw money out the back of and be certain that a deserving poor starving person will receive it. Where is the deserving poor starving person going to go to buy food? There's no private farm to shop at. The government run stores aren't going to take this foreign money. They're stuck with whatever the government dictates will be produced, which is obviously not enough food.
Ignore that problem and assume the shopkeeper or the farmer would take the money. What are they going to do with it? Private property is basically illegal in North Korea, so it's not like the farmer is going to save his money to make a better farm that can feed more people. He can only spend money in state run enterprises, which all feed directly into the government, and the government spends it all on Kalishnakov rifles, nuclear weapons programs, and weird foreign assassinations. These things are not great for solving the problems of starvation and poverty.
North Korea is the most extreme example, but lots of poor countries have problems like this that cannot be solved by simply throwing money out the back of a cargo plane. Poor societies often need to change to become not-poor.