If You Were Put In Charge Of Killing Poverty...

[raum]

Crime is the child of poverty is a statement of fact. You just presumed I was saying something I didn't. With the exception of heinous violent crime indicative of serious mental issues... most crime is committed by people who either had little or no parental supervision. Most of these people are in poverty, some are just families where the parents are absent, and some are very affluent.

At Isles, the secret is not to make the people work hard so they are too busy to mess up their lives, it is to give them supervision and direction and guidance, and to have something to show for it.

and I have no idea where Brains gets off saying someone deserves to be stripped of 90% of their income, but that is a world where I would go V with a Vengence! and i am not the only one.

Our govt. spent 42 million dollars sending letters from the IRS to people who will get rebates to let them know that their rebate checks will be coming in April or May. Nevermind 70% of them filed electronically, and they didn't even use recyclable paper. Brains is mistaken in thinking we don't pay enough in taxes to care for everyone. What happens is the money is SQUANDERED!

[Adtz]

Actually this topic is something I've thought about for a long time. For an exercise in absurd reductionism:

Assume that 10 people can run all the factories in the world to make whatever consumer goods that we need, including food, shelter, etc. What do the rest of the people do? There are *always* unique resources that must be shared. How do we decide?

What is poverty, anyway? By 3rd world standards, the vast majority of US citizens are wealthy i.e. have food, shelter, electricity, running water and sewage. The homeless are not people for whom there is no shelter, but people for whom there is no service e.g. mentally ill, addicted or abused. This isn't a problem of money, but of allocation of resources. Giving these people money would not solve the problem as the majority would be rapidly relieved of it and the would be back where they started.

Please note that the economy is seriously non-linear complex system, so simple solutions that add energy to the system generally result in large and unexpected side effects. This is why centrally planned economies fail. Pumping money into an area can actually result in *less* usable cash because of non-linear effects e.g. money causes inflation which causes loss of value which causes corporate failures which causes job loss which causes poverty. See 16th? century Spain for a notable example of what happens when an economy gets a major infusion of cash with no corresponding productivity gain.

The only real way to solve poverty is to make everyone productive at something. This leads to the overall enriching of society. Transferring money around really doesn't do anything to solve problems - it's a shell game because money isn't real. It's a symbol that's a universally accepted replacement for things of value. Moving money doesn't add value. It doesn't actually *do* anything. Poverty itself is something of an illusion. What it really means is that the resources required (food, shelter, health care) are not available for whatever reason to a subset of the population that needs them. Since we have a surplus of food and shelter, money can easily fix this by reallocating resources. Health care is harder, since there is a limit to the amount of available resources, especially at the high end. Attempting to force it into existence (e.g. mandating what doctors have to do) could actually *reduce* the amount of the resource available as doctors leave the system.

The only way to eliminate shortages of resources is to:
1) Make sure there is a large surplus
2) Encourage the fair sharing of the resource in some manner.

No matter what happens, those with the most power/leverage will gain resources that are in short supply. Attempting to force that to be different by revolution or fiat simply changes who has the leverage -- not that it is evenly shared.

This is why capitalism is useful. It is an automatic way to move resources from where they are common to where they are rare - and thus more valuable. This actually eliminates one of the root causes of "poverty" -- lack of resources. Note that this has nothing to do with the associated political system that the capitalistic system runs in. And it is not "fair" - merely efficient. The problem is when the control of rarity is used to then leverage political power. Democracy attempts to alleviate that leverage somewhat. Socialism does more. All of these come at the cost of loss of efficiency in the economic system.

So it can not be fixed by force or fiat. It can only be ameliorated and only to a degree. The degree depends on how much the society wishes to spend and how much is actually available to distribute.

The best way to eliminate poverty is universal education, developing a *real* health care system, particular in the area of mental health and simply teaching people to be better people and that by doing so, they will make life better for themselves and everyone else.

Nuff rambling.

[raum]

adtz seems to actually get what I am saying...

[trashtalkr]

You've made some great points Adtz. It's like the old saying go "Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man a fish, feed him for a lifetime." In order to end poverty we need to teach skills that are beneficial and then give them opportunities to work.

Great point about money not being real. That's what my real estate mentor told me also

[deepsepia]

Must first ask:

What do you mean by poverty?.

Not the definition that you chose. People living on the street and not knowing how they'll get something to it again or the next day or whatever, these are poor. People who are not able to get medical treatment because of expenses, these are poor...

that's poverty.


I fully agree that some people will always have more than others and good for them! My 'insanely tax the rich' scheme would still give them a lot more than average joe, but they'd contribute a lot to social security as well.

In America, most homelessness is the result of mental illness and substance abuse, and for all the talk of hunger, we in fact have an obesity epidemic, most notably among the "poor". I live in a state with a tremendous number of illegal aliens, truly poor Mexicans and Central Americans who view life in America as so easy and wealthy that its worth all sorts of risks to get here.

Go to any migrant farm community in the Central Valley of Calfornia, for instance, and you'll find little Western Union or other wire shops . . . these dirt poor manual laborers, illegal, speaking little English, manage to earn enough to send $23 Billion back to Mexico in 2006!

People who earn enough money to send money elsewhere are clearly not poor. If illegals with limited educations working manual labor are able to do this then I'd say poverty in America is more about the worker than the system

[Brains]

1. insanely tax riches (both persons and companies)
2. provide a very well funded safety net for poors, so that they can quit working-just-to-piece-the-ends-together and start working to save money and buy their own houses
3. outlaw lobbying
4. outlaw being able to get elected if you have interests in business: sit on a board, have a high position in private companies, have had your complete carreer in business, even - have too many business friends would lead to your non-election in politics, see (3). a separation between politics and business, like we (should) have between church and politics.
that would be some initial things popping into me' brains.

i thought of this post when hearing the news today about Obama's second day in office... so far, so good with the man.

[AYHJA]

We have a Brains sighting...I repeat, we have a Brains sighting..!

[Brains]

yeah Ayhja... it's a mystery indeed...

I referenced Ayhja forums here. ;)

[AYHJA]

Hey man, thanks for the plug..!

Damn shame you don't come to stir the pot more, especially missing all the election gab we had going...You're always welcome here Bro...

[Brains]

gah! shite!! don't tell me i missed the election gab! :no: