The political class actually love having poor people dependent on welfare, because it's their voting base. Another important point about the welfare system is that it fallaciously assumes that unsuccessful people necessarily are 'exploited', and that successful people necessarily are 'exploitative', but the thing is that one demographic group can actually perform worse than another demographic group, naturally. I'm pretty sure that welfare by heavy taxation is NOT the right way to go in order to balance that. It also very much depends on how we define 'poverty.' Usually we automatically take, say, the bottom 10% in terms of income or wealth and label them "poor." With this definition we will always have 'poverty', since there will always be a 'bottom 10%'. With this we ignore that the bottom 10% have excessively better living standards than compared to 100 years ago, correlating with market freedom that has flourished in SPITE of the state.