Why can't Americans realize the nation's worst problem is poverty?

I just don't get it. Maybe I just see it more because I live around one of the most impoverished cities in the country, but I think it's the most serious issue for the 2008 election.

So far it seems only John Edwards realizes the seriousness of the problem.

http://johnedwards.com/issues/poverty/

Are people not going to wake up to the problem until they're forced to dumpster dive and live in cardboard boxes themselves?

Give a low income person the car fare to the job interview.

Help a college student pay for one of their over-priced text books.

Teach someone who is illiterate to read. (Pay yourself the ten bucks an hour you devote to them)

Or who is math illiterate to calculate. (See above)

...oh, and EDUCATION.

Not to mention the car.

It takes ONE nine month experience of bad health combined with
medical bills and insurance payments to wipe out a lifetime of savings (even though the party is INSURED) to bring you from middle class to POOR!

So yes, Ten bucks to get someone to work (Hitchhiking on a rainy day is not going to leave the interviewer with a good idea of your grooming skills) might well be the "nudge" that works

an organization that did exactly that for women who'd left abusive marriages and were starting over.

:)

I am doing adult literacy. It is a disgrace how US high schools graduate people who can not read, because of learning disabilities and then they have to find strategies to hide it on the job. Plus, there are people from Mexico (legals) who never got to finish more than a couple of years of school. Their wages will never rise if they do not learn to read and write.

Where I am volunteering, one trainer works with one to three people. These are not fidgety kids. They want to learn, and they learn quickly. All they need is someone to teach. A lot of someones.

Volunteer.

http://www.portfolio.com/views/columns/2007/10/15/Charity-Makes-Wealth

Giving Makes You Rich

...Less poetically, the idea is this: Giving makes you rich. A lovely sentiment, to be sure, but quite backward-sounding to an economist. You obviously have to have money before you can give it away, right? Or in the pithy words of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, “No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions—he had money too.”

Well, it turns out that Gaius was right, and new economic research backs him up. Emerging evidence—crunchy statistics from real data, not the mushy self-help stuff—supports the contention that giving stimulates prosperity, for both individuals and nations. Charity, it appears, can really make you rich.

and old racial stereotypes come in, thanks in large part to the GO(R)P(grand old racist party). From many people I have talked with recently your last statement is probably true. When they are broke they will be concerned about poverty.

Poverty is more of a somber issue as opposed to something dramatic that they can scare you with such as crime (a direct result of poverty) or terrorism.

Recently, a clerk at a convenience store across from my school was killed in a robbery. I went and got sandwiches from him all of the time. Well, a robber walked in one night, pulled out a gun, asked for the money and the clerk handed it to him. The guy shot him anyway, along with his son, who survived. Yet another senseless and terrible gun murder in a country where that kind of thing happens way to often.

Anyways, for the next couple of days around school, I hear people saying like "they should cut off the hands of whomever did that," or "they should put all these people on an island and let them kill one another." While I understand the rage at a time like that (I felt it myself) nowhere did I hear anybody mention that a possible solution to many of these senseless crimes would be to eliminate poverty in the United States. They did eventually catch the guy that did it, and surprise, he comes from a dirt poor family ravaged by drugs and alcohol. I'm not saying that's an excuse, it's just that there's a definite pattern to the types of people that commit these crimes. That guy deserves to spend the rest of his life locked up, but someone else will one day commit the same crime he did, because the root cause of the problem is never addressed.

I finally suggested it one day, and everybody looked at me, thought for a moment, and then nodded their heads in agreement. No one had even thought of it as a solution. It was all "more prisons," "tougher punishments," "torture" ect. I told them I didn't know how to eliminate poverty in the U.S., only that it was really the only solution. More prisons, tougher sentences, medieval punishments and the like may keep the numbers down for a little bit, but they will never eliminate the problem altogether because it doesn't address the issue of why these things happen. And while I don't know how to eliminate poverty, I think the fact that 95% of the wealth in this county is concentrated in the hands of 5% of the people is a good place to start.

That was back in the 60's. Johnson was going to bring on his "Great Society" agenda a bit later. I learned then that poverty in America was hidden. We talked about Appalachia, the South and the Native Americans in the West.

Now, more than 40 years later not much has changed except that more white families have fallen into poverty. The right says it's their own fault. In the 60's you could get a large majority of voters to back a "Great Society" agenda but not today.

Obama says the issues of us boomers back in the 60's are not relevant today. Many DUers agree. So I guess poverty isn't a relevant issue today.

Poverty in this country has been turned from a social issue into an issue of individual shortcomings.

The poor are poor, not because of societal ills, but because of something they have or haven't done.

Whether it's smoking, drinking, homelessness, joblessness ... whatever ... we jump to the handy-dandy escape clause and pile on. We even treat taxation as a way of levying fines on behavior we disapprove of -- and BUY INTO the specious claims of the very wealthy that their estates shouldn't be taxed since it'd be a PENALTY(!!) for being rich. Bullshit. Taxes are best based on an ability to pay for the system of governance that has ALREADY benefited the few and not the many. Yet the few continuously claim the entitlement to bias the system even further at the same time they demand more discounts on the costs. It's appalling. "Sympathy" for those best off and "blame" for those least well off? It's truly Through The Looking Glass. Insane.

Americans can't stand the thought of lazy bums that live off of the government. It leads them to elect politicians who reduce spending by cutting into the $30 billion we spend on welfare (I believe that was approximately the figures before Welfare Reform) instead of the $500 billion we spend on defense, and that's not even counting the Iraq War.

I'm sure that SOME people on welfare are lazy bums that live off of the government who are "ripping off the taxpayers". And I'm also sure that they are ripping off the taxpayers a tiny fraction of what Halliburton is ripping us off.

The war on poverty was in fact very effective. But because it didn't bring everybody out of poverty, Americans were led to believe it was a failure and a huge waste of their hard earned money. No government program is going to be 100% effective and there will always be free loaders.

The benefits of a second war on poverty would likely outweigh the costs. The problem is that Americans are just too outraged about the possibility of free loaders to consider such a policy rationally. That's one of the many reasons that the Republic Party exists. They take exaggerate the instances of free loading and make up outrageous stories about "Welfare Queens" and people believe it.

If the subject were debated rationally, people would see that free loading is one of the inevitable costs of a program and while things can be done to reduce it, it can't be eliminated completely. Even with free loading the benefits of fighting poverty still outweigh the costs. But as long as people are jealous of those free loaders, they will never come to that very rational conclusion.

I have always thought that a base living amount would at least bribe people to not commit crimes. Sure would be cheaper than locking them up. So what that some would freeload on the system; perhaps one of them would be the next Picasso or Einstein.

But Americans don't care if Bribery is cheaper, they would rather spend more money punishing people than less money bribing them.

Plus there will always be Republicans there to lie to them and tell them that prisons are cheaper than welfare.

... of a few dozen Republicans. That's guaranteed money. Republicans will buy anything.

But poverty is usually the red flag that wakes sleeping individuals up after an idiotic slumber so they begin to pay attention and care about everything else that they've diligently ignored for the past seven years and have caused the poverty to begin with--that's when they start to care about foreign policy, debt, the markets, twin deficits, privatization, corporate abuses, etc..

It's a true pity and a disaster that people need to hit rock bottom personally before they give a shit about politics they should have cared about all along.

they ARE impoverished?"

I hear people deny this all the time, even though they have no health insurance, work two jobs, have no time to enjoy the actual experience of even being alive.

It's so pitiful. Like Michael Moore says in SICKO, "Who are we?" What have we become?

On this, and on many issues, as soon as the government tries to improve matters, an awful lot of people - and not just right-wingers - will be up in arms yelling 2Big Government!" and "Socialism!"

Unfortunately, no-one but the US government can do very much to reduce the poverty level in the US.

It seems to me he is right on about rebuilding America. I know Dennis is too, but I got to pick one or the other and I do love Elizabeth Edwards.

I would like to see an Edwards/Kucinich ticket in 2008!

I'm sure the other candidates do as well. Poor Americans are more important than poor non-Americans. After all Americans are just a little bit more equal than other humans. :puke:

to solve, and because doing something about it would likely require action from all of us in some way.

I don't agree with that, necessarily, but I think that's how it's seen.

I do agree that it's a problem at the heart of so many of our other problems. But it's not nice and neat and linear -- there are other problems that are also at the heart of poverty -- it's more like a big knot.

If someone could convincingly argue to the American people that the problem IS solvable, and that it won't be unduly painful, it could be done. But it would take someone with a great deal of leadership ability, and a lot of trust from across the electorate. And to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure after these last years that we'll be ready to trust anyone again.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7106726.stm
<snip>
Over 1.3 million people, one in six New Yorkers, cannot afford enough food, with queues at soup kitchens getting longer, anti-poverty groups say.

The New York City Coalition Against Hunger says the number of people who use food pantries and soup kitchens in the city increased by 20% in 2007.

"Given that hunger continued to increase in the city, even when the economy was still strong last year, it is no wonder that now, when the economy is weakening, lines at pantries and kitchens are getting even worse."

Some food outlets said they would not be able to distribute turkey rations for Thanksgiving on Thursday, because their federal supplies of food had been cut by as much as three-quarters.

Thanks George!

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