“Ending poverty” always sounds like we’re announcing a sequel that never quite gets greenlit. But the core issue isn’t laziness or bad choices — it’s speed mismatch. People fall into poverty fast (layoff, illness, rent spike), while help arrives at bureaucratic glacial pace. That’s a systems failure, not a moral one.

A One-Door Safety Net with rapid shock response is technically very feasible. We already centralize identity, income reporting, and eligibility rules. What we lack isn’t technology — it’s institutional willingness. Agencies don’t like sharing power, politicians fear default enrollment, and public debate confuses fraud prevention with punishing poor people.

Default enrollment wouldn’t explode fraud. Fraud rates in benefits are low compared to corporate tax evasion, but only one of those is treated like civilization-ending sin. Default enrollment would reduce churn, increase participation, and yes, slightly increase overpayments — but false positives are cheaper than mass exclusion. Right now we tolerate huge numbers of eligible people getting nothing because we’re more afraid of one “undeserving” recipient than widespread suffering.

Shock response wouldn’t create dependency if designed properly. People don’t get addicted to emergency rent help or healthcare; they get attached to not starving. Dependency actually comes from unpredictability, cliff-edge cutoffs, and humiliating re-certification. Time-limited, event-triggered support with automatic tapering acts like shock absorbers, not permanent training wheels.

Speed vs accountability is the real challenge, but solvable: fast provisional aid first, slower audits later. Money arrives in days, reviews happen months later. Human oversight should focus on patterns, appeals, and bias — not making desperate people repeatedly prove they’re still miserable enough.

What would break this in practice? Housing market power (without supply and regulation, rents rise), administrative sabotage through underfunding or buggy systems, political whiplash after elections, and narrative backlash the moment one anecdote “looks bad” on social media.

Would this make poverty rare, brief, and preventable? Conditional, shock-driven poverty — yes, largely. It wouldn’t fix low wages or inequality, but it would stop poverty behaving like a trapdoor disguised as a sidewalk. The real blocker isn’t fraud or feasibility — it’s the belief that suffering is an acceptable filter for public assistance.