But America is a highly developed country and a democracy. China is not a democracy and India and Africa are still developing nations. So you really can't compare. And just look at the hunger problem that exists in staggering numbers in America -- in America! The pictures here say more than 1,000 words, but the words are heartbreaking, scroll about 1/2 way down the page and you'll find this: "Starvation also drives many to eat dirt. Many black women in Mississippi, Alabama and North Carolina eat clay even in the 90's according to New York Times." http://www.american-pictures.com/roots/chapter-16.htm

Not taking responsibility for the reality of this WITHIN OUR OWN COUNTRY and instead trying to make it some figment of the "American left's" imagination only widens the gap between the haves and have nots and leaves millions of American citizens wasting away right beneath our noses.

It certainly is tragic, but I am concerned about where we dump the responsibility. I believe it is on the American people to help the less fortunate (as opposed to the government). But if we ever really want to stop poverty, we have to reduce a culture which condones irresponsibility. I of course am not claiming all people living in poverty are lazy, but there is an epidemic in this country of irresponsibility, and that will certainly be an obstacle to ending poverty in America.

Nobody is making it a figment of anyone's imagination. But when people on the left criticize America for having people living in poverty, they're usually not appealing to individual citizens to fix it. When they start promoting individual generosity, not charity at the tip of a spear, I'll think about supporting their arguments. But when they continuously blame America's enterprise system while condoning irresponsible behavior, you're not going to get full scale support in America.

Helping people out of poverty is a great thing, but usually "closing the income gap" is argued in a way that I will never support. And I don't think my objection to that is trivial, I think it is unspeakably important for the future of this country.

I was about to launch a full-scale rebuttal, shiner, but I suddenly flashed on the 3+-hour debates I'd have with one of my brothers about these type issues and I'm going to pull off that experience ---- we never made any kind of impression on each other with our opinions and I can tell you and I would have the same kind of exchange. So we'll just stare at each other from across the aisle on this one because I don't want to get all mad and emotional (which this subject makes me) at this late hour, k?

Of course, you're free to do whatever you want. I'm not really looking to persuade you, some people don't agree that protecting free enterprise is important for America. A lot of people, actually. Many of them work in places that end in "College" or "University".

See, you're pulling me in, but I'm resisting... I will say, though, that I happen to be a person that believes that protecting free enterprise and protecting the poorest of the poor don't have to be mutually exclusive. I happen to be a fan of capitalism for many reasons, I also believe in social responsibility. At the personal AND governmental levels. And I don't work at an institution of higher education.

It wasn't my intent to assert that all of that applied to you. I was merely trying to say that there is a fundamental disagreement on this issue that doesn't get talked about a lot. I think that is mostly because people who harbor anti-capitalist views keep it hidden (and I think this number is actually pretty large).

I don't think they have to be mutually exclusive either, until you start bringing in government action. At that point in my mind, the only question is how significant the infringement will be, but the breach is there, nonetheless.

When Republicans run the country, the poor don't get fed. When Democrats run the country, the poor don't get fed. It's not a left versus right thing. If the GOP had a marvelous *something* that made sure the poor of the cities and of Appalachia alike had food to eat I would sign on in an instant. At the very least, the Democrats pay lip service to it. It doesn't even seem to be on the Republican's radar.

And that's not even getting into the fact that it takes two incomes to make ends meet these days. It used to be that minimum wage was what it took to feed the man, his wife, and his family. If that had remained the standard, I'd be on your side of the fence, where the unemployed (temporarily) and the unemployable (permanent) are the only ones who really need help.

Instead a household needs 2-3 incomes just to support themselves, and God forbid they get sick or hurt - minimum wage jobs don't provide insurance - because then they're "freeloading" off our healthcare system (aka going into massive debt). THAT is the state of the country today and THAT is disgusting in a country as rich as we are. And the reason why people turn to the government is because the problem is SO huge and the resources of charities are SO small that it is overwhelming.

It is arguably in the best interest of the country for individuals to grow up with good nutrition (WIC, food stamps), education (public schools), and a roof over their heads (subsidized housing). These things are needed for healthy, working citizens.

I'm not necessarily speaking of it being a partisan issue. It can break down that way too, but when I say left, I mean the red-on-the-inside true left. The problem is that many people who feel passionately about poverty (or global warming, or whatever) tie themselves into these partisan causes. The Democrats do give lip service to poverty, and they also connect it to socialistic economic policies which guarantees that half the country will automatically be opposed to it.

I think your "state of the country" comments are relatively sensationalized, but nonetheless I think you're right that we should be doing more to help the less fortunate. But I don't see any solutions. The government has been in the social engineering business for decades now, with nothing but utter failure to show for it.

We need someone to restore the sense of pride people take in this country, and that is needed to accomplish two purposes:

A) Citizens need to recognize that it is their responsibility to help other Americans, not the government's. Clearly the government is completely ineffective when it comes to screening, and many people simply won't seek out help, and other citizens will need to bring it to them.

B) Second, we need a culture where it is simply unacceptable not to be able to provide for one's family. I know there are millions of poor people out there who feel just like this, and I think they're the ones who will manage to escape the grasps of poverty and public assistance. Your parents probably saw a culture like this, I know mine did. I'm not saying we should all chastise people of moderate means, but we must restore some sense of responsibility into American culture.

Of course, my vision for this depends on a host of factors. Fathers have to start taking responsibility for their families. People must make better reproductive decisions. We must have better race relations in this country, meaning an open dialogue without fear of stigma. We have to change how people look at labor.

And no, I'm not willing to cut off children to force their parents to be responsible (because I'm not sure they'll react). But I also won't support any new effort to end poverty that centers on the helplessness of people in poverty. I don't think the solution to decades of failed policies is simply to double the same efforts.

This caught my eye. There seems to be a floating definition of poverty.

Is someone going to be able to support the lifestyle they want off of minimum wage? Hardly.

Is someone going to be able to provide the five basics for human survival? Most definitely.

The sense of entitlement is astounding. The right to health care. The right to own a car. The right to have a TV.

Point out where this is guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.

At current Federal levels ($5.85 an hour), the worker working 40 hours per week for 52 weeks will result in $12,168 per year. If you assume that housing costs should not exceed 28% of the yearly gross income (standard for assuming mortgage loans), then this person will need to find a house or apartment with mortgage or rent of $282.93 per month. After that expenditure, the person will be left with $653.07 for the month. Average utilities cost (basic heat, electric, water, trash) will run about another $200 per month, depending on what month it is). So then you're left with $453.07. Groceries for the month will easily run $50 per week for a single, a lot more if you have a family. My fam of 4 spends on average $150 per week (and that's making use of sales and coupons). So that would be another $200, leaving $250.

Now, come the decisions... do you live in an area that you can make use of transportation to get to work? If not, you'll need a car. But on that $250, you probably can't afford the insurance and gas (assuming you have a clunker, because then you'd also have a payment). You may have a good friend who could take you to work, but you'd still have to contribute to the gas money.

Or do you pay for health care? A basic, no frills, high deductible/co-pay plan will run about $50 bucks a month for a young, healthy person. But for a family, again, that will be more. Having basic care is not a "frill"... it will help prevent possible bankruptcy in the event of a major medical catastrophe.

I don't know about you, but this scenario is very troubling in a country that is so prosperous. ESPECIALLY if this scenario is happening to a family. It is QUITE obvious that Drolefille's assessment is correct, that families will most definitely be dependent on 2-3 jobs. Even in rural areas, I think rent will cost more than $280 per month. I used to live in a small town and even there, my rent for a meager 2 bedroom apartment was $325.

I suggest, just for fun, that you go to hulu.com (a tv site) and watch the minimum wage episode of 30 days.

And I'm sorry lumping a TV and a car in with health care? What do you want to happen if someone who is uninsured breaks his or her leg? Let them have a broken leg, not work, and slowly starve to death? Yeah, you're right. Health care is a luxury.

My comments are "sensational" because they are one extreme. I fully acknowledge that they're a one-sided perspective, but I think they are one that cannot be ignored. I think there's a big gap between considering people to be helpless and acknowledging that they're looking at a mathematically impossible situation. We're talking here about people who ARE "helping" and working and still spinning their wheels because there's no upward movement in our society any more.

I don't 100% agree with your ideal plan up there, but I'd be on board if I thought it would actually occur.

Sure, and I know that it IS the state of America for some. But when I hear a poverty advocate make overbroad statements, it repels me. I think a lot of people would say the same. I know it is a passionate issue for many, but often that passion can lead to assertions which harm the speaker's credibility.

I don't know how realistic my idealized scenario is, but I firmly believe it is the only way to truly mitigate the problem of poverty in America. What is the standard we're satisfied with? Does everyone have to be middle class? Or does everyone just have to have life's essentials? While I do hope more people are able to achieve the American dream, I'm not really interested in engineering that.

Fair enough, I go there because so many people brush poverty up as urban "welfare moms" who are "lazy" etc. There's a portion of the population that abuses the system, there are many more who need a system, or something.

If we could make sure people got fed, clean water, safe shelter, and medical treatment I would consider that the basic needs. In return I'd want people who are capable of working to work, and people who are not capable receiving rehabilitation (therapy, medication, education, whatever they're lacking). There will always be some portion of the population incapable of working.

The problem is that this is a system, and to address crime you need to address poverty, to address poverty you need to address crime, etc.

THIS.

So, so, so well-said, Drolefille.

Precisely.

You're right, and to address both you have address parenting and substance abuse and so on. I'm not overly fond of the argument that poverty is a valid excuse for crime, but I realize that they're often relatively inseparable.

I have yet to hear anyone who truly thinks that poverty is an excuse for crime. I think that is a mischaracterization often given to "liberal" arguments so that no one will listen to them. It is more like poverty is part of an explanation (and we have to understand the complicated multiple factors of why someone might decide to resort to crime in order to correct the problem). I think that is often a misperception of some.

I'm not sure I've ever heard someone overtly say that crime is excusable because of poverty, but I've heard people come close. When you say that reducing poverty is necessary to reduce crime, it removes responsibility from those who've chosen to break the law, and I simply won't support that. How about we try and reduce poverty by helping people, and crime by punishing people?

Are poverty and crime correlated? Sure. Do they have to be? No.

No one said that in this thread and people who say that in real life are confusing the issue.

Poverty is a correlate of crime. It doesn't cause it and therefore doesn't "explain" it.

How about we stop creating these distinctions for social issues that are so intertwined. We don't have to pick and choose. A mixture of addressing poverty and inequality in education along with holding people accountable for their actions will suffice. But people are so bent on these bullcrap liberal (address the root causes and potentially raise taxes) vs. conservative (blame people so we don't have to raise taxes for what's a personal problem) loyalties that they won't push to integrate these approaches. That's too much like right.

In an ideal world, you're right.

However, explaining something, particularly from a sociological/psychological perspective isn't the same as excusing it and I think that's a difficulty that people really have in these discussions. Explaining why a man murders his wife and children by looking at his past, his environment, his own psychological status doesn't make it okay. In the end he still chose to act.

Personal responsibility is a problem. However you get a kid who started hanging out with the guys on the corner back when he was 12. He's 17 or 18 and he gets arrested, what do we do with him? If we lock all of those kids up, they're MORE dependent on the state. However we also can't let criminals run free.

That's why I'm suggesting we address the systems in place when that kid was 11. It's the only way out of a no-win situation.

I guess I'm reluctant to agree that we have people starving who the government could actually help, and I think that our actual problem with food for the poor runs more to problems with their eating foods with high caloric content but not particularly good nutritional value, largely because individuals are provided with choice in the food they get.

The people who are starving are people, as much as I know, who because of their own poor mental health, drug use, or illegal immigration status won't seek the help from the community that is available. I suppose we could add ignorance about the assistance available. For example, we've got free or reduced price lunch programs in every public school, and if the needs at a particular school are high enough, they often have breakfast programs as well. We have food stamps, and charity food banks too.

I think the number of starving people in the US who seek help, especially from government funded social services, who are turned away with no food or referrals to other services is probably really tiny. But if they don't know who to ask or how to get the help, it's hard to figure out how all the social programs, especially bureaucratically administrated government ones, will really make anything better.

You can't give people the large amount of personal freedom that we do and then somehow expect that we can take care of everyone, especially in cases where the local community is unaware of the need.

I stand by my claim that people imagine that the world hates us for the very issues that those individuals don't like about ourselves whatever those might be, and while any of us might disagree with a particular reason or set of reasons, there's no way to know what changes we could make that would make people hate us less.

(In general, I agree that our recent foreign policy makes us seem arrogant. Would you educate me about what debts we haven't paid internationally? If it's anything other than basically funding the UN ourselves, I'm interested in learning about it.)

I said clearly we should address both issues, but we shouldn't strive to stop one issue as a reason for another. I don't want a society that has low crime simply because poverty has been eliminated. I want this country to have reduced crime resulting from society taking a stand which says there is absolutely no excuse for it.

I'd take low crime because of low poverty, but it wouldn't mean I'd let the few criminals we did have off the hook.

I would take it too, but it isn't a "real" fix.

Huh?

Well, I think it'd would be a fix if it delivered the results, but it's wouldn't be better than a society with low poverty AND a shared sense of ethical behavior and a willingness of its citizens to act on those beliefs.

But we seem to have given up on the idea that we can teach and enforce any uniform sense of citizenship or character.

Second sentence got sort of unwieldy.

Option A) Crime is reduced because of efforts made on the poverty front

Option B) Crime goes down because of a societal shift which places pressure on individuals to act responsibly.

I choose option B. Although I would take option A, being satisfied with that isn't enough because it addresses motivations instead of end results.

I care that people are poor. I don't care why they commit crime (I actually do, but not for the purpose of this discussion). I don't care that Cho got made fun of, I don't care that Denmark newspapers ran offensive cartoons. Regardless of alleged motivations, criminal end results are simply unacceptable.

I think we should work on both fronts, and I'm not arguing for a false dichotomy. I realize they're intertwined, but I'd like to see us work toward real solutions for each. Otherwise we end up with one real solution and one temporary solution which is bound for failure when some other stress-inducing catalyst develops.

Yes I agree absolutely. And you're right, if we could magically cure poverty which is directly correlated to crime, then sure, crime would stay low while poverty was low...until some other prompting event occurs which sparks the underlying issues we haven't been able to resolve.

It's not something you agree with or don't, it's fact. You're thinking of a stereotype of urban poor.
http://www.secondharvest.org/who_we_...ger_facts.html
This is about elderly people living on fixed incomes, people who cannot support themselves on the wages available, urban and rural.

So the mentally ill don't deserve food? These things are wonderful if you live in a large enough city to support them and have transportation etc. Your perspective is very very focused on one portion of the population. See the links above about people in America who resort to eating clay.

So you're for the social programs run by the government? And if those aren't adequately meeting the needs of the population you'd be for expanding them so they are?


... I cannot follow that sentence. People in the world hate us for different reasons, but you cannot exclude reasons because they don't fit your worldview.

Monetary as well as other promises we make, but you do realize that 25% of our national debt is in the hands of foreign countries right?

We also do owe the UN 1.246 billion dollars because Congress thinks its fun not to pay in order to try and make the UN do what we want. We currently pay 22% of the UN's budget because they have a "ability to pay" scale. This does not make use "basically funding the UN ourselves"

To be fair, the UN's reliance on the United States extends far beyond mere financial support.

For example, they were completely unprepared to take significant action on Iraq, despite a decade of Saddam rebuking their authority. (I'm not arguing the war here, just that the UN has no inherent spine).

Look at today, where the IAEA pitched a fit about Syria, and the US told them to go screw themselves. The world's nuclear agency didn't have the information, so they bitched at the US.

It isn't a matter of choice, though.

There is no predicting which crime prevention measure will actually make crime decrease. And there's no way of knowing that Option B works unless evaluations are conducted that determine that it was Option B instead of Option A and/or other factors (stronger family units, decreased structural inequalities, better schooling, etc.).

But like I said implementing a number of crime prevention and control measures provides a holistic approach. We just have to get tax payers to understand that these prevention measures are not free. Even holding individuals accountable through punishment and advancing family values and morality aren't free initiatives.

Not guaranteed. But we would be addressing one of the many correlates of crime, plus improving other aspects of this "powerful industrialized, civilized, economically developed, capitalist nation."

We might not have to wait for a prompting event, however, crime rates do respond to economic shifts, imprisonment rates, demographic shifts, and so forth.

The UN is as effective as the permanent 5 will let it be. In another word, the perm 5 does not want an effective UN.

No, what works isn't a matter of choice. Societal attitude toward crime is, however.

Regardless of increased tax revenue, government action will never solve America's crime problem. I hope you don't think the awareness of taxpayers is the biggest obstacle to advances in this arena.

No, not guaranteed. I was simplifying the hypothetical to show my line of reasoning.

Sure, lets work to end poverty. So long as we know we're engaging in temporary appeasement when it comes to crime.

For the UN to be effective, the perm 5 has to facilitate it, they are not restraining some innately powerful entity.

Addressing the correlates of crime isn't a temporary adjustment.