Some people are poor because they're honestly down on their luck, and need a helping hand. The majority on the other hand are simply unemployable, or horrible with their finances. Give them a handout and the money will simply end up in richer people's hands. That's not helping them.

...wait, isn't that YCombinator?

I think it would be a great experiment, though.

I think the bar for poor needs to be a little lower than 50k/year.

I wasn't shooting for the poor. I was shooting for a bunch of people. It's roughly half of the households in the country. That's a lot of liquid capital to inject into the economy at once -- around 5% of our GNP.

In fact, $50k is approximately the median household income (for 2007), with mean household sizes in that income bracket at about 2.6.

American, meet the reason for your economic crisis.

I've got a $100K job offer pending my graduation, and even with that I still have to be aware of my budget to even save something.

Remember - most of america is not SF!!!

Get a mortgage on something like this: http://www.househunterbob.com/Listing/ViewListingDetails.asp... and for $50K per year - you can buy 500 houses!