However, if you gave $11K in seed capital to anyone making under $50k who has a viable plan for a business with the promise of a few hundred K more if they started showing traction, then you might shake things up a bit.

...wait, isn't that YCombinator?

I don't think the yC model would scale up to 700B.

I think it would be a great experiment, though.

Grameen bank?

Hey, I was working with a college degree for 3 years before I broke 50k. At the time I was investing 8% of my income and I was still eating out all the time etc.

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

Is a collage degree made up of other degrees that are cut apart and then pasted back together to form pretty pictures? (couldn't resist).

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.

How many kids were you trying to support?

Family size for $50k to qualify under the federally mandated definition of poverty is 12.

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