It makes me sick that I pay around 40% in state and federal taxes and social security (not that much lower than Western European countries) yet there is still so much poverty and poverty related issues in our country.I wonder how much of this has to do with scale. Americans often look to European countries as models of what governments should do, but I think we often forget that most of those countries have smaller populations than New York City[0]. And, if I can vaguely trust what I'm reading, many of the larger countries have poverty issues that are not unlike those of the U.S.
So, your 40% tax rate is used to combat the issues of ~313 million people across wildly different situations. I'm sure that if NYC could collect a 40% tax rate and implemented programs focused on its own issues, the government could do a lot more to combat poverty. But, NYC only gets a piece of the pie, and the federal government needs to figure out how to help the homeless in NYC as well as the homeless in Washington, DC, and Chicago, IL, and.....
Given that, I tend to think there is not a technocratic solution to poverty in the U.S.--that is, it isn't just that we haven't quite found the proper program, or implemented it properly. Homelessness and poverty have been around for a long time, and while during some periods, some governments may have done alright in dealing with it, no one is ever going to turn a knob and make poverty magically disappear. That's not say we shouldn't try, but we also need plenty of organizations that simply get out there and provide basic help for the homeless (food, shelter, etc).
[0] I'm making a broad generalization, yes.