Once again, there is a lot of talk about poverty. The Buncombe County Commissioners are going to review outside agency funding. This is not the usual part of the budget session where one party shoes how compassionate they are for taking money from the working poor to give to the nonworking poor, and the other party gains points for skimming one-thousandth of one percent out of the budget. Commissioner Joe Belcher is attempting to change policies to make county grants performance-based. Nonetheless, one can expect more evidence of nonprofits in the firing range bending the ears of newspaper staff.

Actually, since the recession ended, Western North Carolina has seen a steady trickle of human interest stories about nonprofits suffering insufficient charitable donations to go around. Government keeps creating jobs, but the needs of the unemployed keep increasing. The good folks of WNC aren’t exactly Calcutta-poor. Poor children are more likely to be demanding a sixth pair of dress shoes for play than going around barefoot. They are more likely to throw away much of their universal breakfast and free/reduced lunch than suffer kwashiorkor.

Have we reached a low-point as a society where the Samaritan’s dilemma is playing out for the worse? A caller to Pete Kaliner’s show on 570AM WWNC told of his experience in one of Asheville’s sister cities wherein local producers of, say, sandals, were being pushed out of the market by religious charities importing free sneakers. I don’t know the right answers, but I know a wrong one is to tax the middle class into poverty.