The other side of income is spending. Income by itself is a meaningless concept. What matters is what that income can buy. If income goes up 100% but prices for necessary stuff goes up 200%, well you're a whole lot poorer than you used to be.
Being poor means you don't have enough money to buy what you need. The current drivers of poverty in the US are cost of housing and cost of health care. If we simply give money to the poor without addressing inflation in the housing and healthcare markets, nothing has been solved.
Please suspend any scoffing and check out the following:
Reduce the cost of housing and healthcare in this country and you go a long way towards alleviating the misery of poverty.
Reference:
The Hamilton Project, “Where Does All the Money Go: Shifts in Household Spending Over the Past 30 Years” by Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, Ryan Nunn, Lauren Bauer, and Megan Mumford (http://www.hamiltonproject.org/papers/where_does_all_the_money_go_shifts_in_household_spending_over_the_past_30_y).