| Submit your comments on this article |
| Home Front: Politix |
| It's time to end the war on poverty |
| 2008-02-21 |
| I remember when Lyndon Johnson began the War on Poverty in ’64. For a time I was a foot soldier on the front lines first in Model Cities than in the Welfare System. Back then as now the cries were for solving the pressing problems of hunger and deprivation and helping the poor through new affordable housing, education, job training, community deve-lopment and medical care. We are in a quagmire. The amount of blood and treasure committed to this ‘unconditional war’ is impossible to tally. Our major cities have become war zones with gangs running unchecked. Philadelphia alone, the City of Brotherly Love, had 406 recorded homicides in ’06 and 391 in ’07. That is not counting the rapes, robberies, molestations and assaults. This is the result of governing with feelings and not thinking about the consequences – political correctness gone amok. We are still reeling from the backlash created by the attention the War on Poverty gave to Black America. Forty-four years later and in spite of everything done we hear candidates like Hillary, Barack Obama and John Edwards, railing about the plight of the poor and homeless. The lack of money spent on the children and our crumbling schools discounting that we have one of the highest rates of per pupil spending in the world is always worked into the diatribes. Anti-war Democrats are still complaining that spending on the War (then it was Vietnam) is choking off the funds needed to help our people at home. It is curious that Sen. Obama’s “Global Poverty Act” (S.2433 got some help from Sen. Biden in his attempted to rush it through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on Feb. 14. This bill if passed would impose a Global Tax on the US and take $845 BILLION over 13 years away from the needy children in the US and place the money under the dictates of the UN. Oprah, one of Sen. Obama’s chief supporters, has also discovered that it is not worth helping educate the poor in the US. It was better to take her millions overseas and set up an exclusive palatial girls school in Africa. Unfortunately, she was unable to protect the students from abuse at the hands of her employees. In the last 4+ decades TRILLIONS have been confiscated from American workers creating a cycle of dependency in the guise of wiping out poverty in the US. Every election cycle we hear the empty platitudes and the inflaming class warfare language of the politicians promising everything on someone else’s dime. Now we are threatened with initiatives to funnel our tax dollars to a corrupt UN. I think it is past time to end this made up, never ending War on Poverty with it’s PC mentality and instead resurrect the American Spirit before we no longer recognize the place that the Greatest generation fought to preserve. Lee Jenkins is a staff writer for the Tinytown Gazette |
| Posted by:no mo uro |
| #9 Yep, one of my pet rocks as well......seeing people who are fat as hell telling me they're poor, need affordable health insurance, while smoking a cigarette, watching their 42" t.v. and bitching about their old junk car....in countries I've been to, truly poor people don't have the luxury to bitch about any of these things... I love my country but sometimes realy dislike many of its inhabitants. |
| Posted by: Broadhead6 2008-02-21 20:07 |
| #8 The War on Poverty is a quagmire, re-deploy to West Palm Beach. |
| Posted by: GolfBravoUSMC 2008-02-21 18:07 |
| #7 The bulk of the poor as defined by the government are young adults. College students and recent grads just starting out. People that move out of poverty as they age. Unless we account for this any arguement about the poor is dishonest. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2008-02-21 14:13 |
| #6 QUAGMIRE!!!! Ironically, all the dhimocrat power is built on this house of sand. |
| Posted by: DarthVader 2008-02-21 09:29 |
| #5 Middle class in China: $700USD/month. I'm not kidding. |
| Posted by: gromky 2008-02-21 08:17 |
| #4 Global Poverty Act: (red)istribution. Globally. |
| Posted by: eLarson 2008-02-21 08:13 |
| #3 The 100 Years War was shorter than any War on Poverty (or Drugs) will ever be. Here's how it works, more or less. Define poverty as the bottom 10% (in income, assets, whatever). Give them enough stuff to get over the threshhold that defined their status. No more poverty, right? Wrong. There's still a bottom 10%, just with a new threshhold. Repeat ad infinitum. (The saddest thing - it will be the same 10% over and over again, no matter how much you give them.) |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2008-02-21 07:36 |
| #2 Poverty you hear about is 'statistical' poverty which would place most of the people so classified into middle class just about anyplace else on the planet. We do have traditional or classical poverty, but at numbers so low that most Americans wouldn't pay attention so the socialist hucksters keep playing a three card monty game of showing you the image of the few and use the number of the many. The fundamental problem of classical poverty in America is human free will. For there are those in every category of color, race and creed who make decision that either get them out or keep them in the condition. The four major contributors to classical poverty in America are substance abuse, creating families before establishing skills to provide for them, blowing off one's education and keeping to the old ways. Each and everyone of those occur in an exercise of human free will. No socialist agenda has yet successfully addressed solving that particular problem short of making the parties thralls to someone in authority. That is why in a free country, there will always be some form of poverty. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac - you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. It was true three hundred years ago, it's true today. Human behavior doesn't' change. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2008-02-21 07:11 |
| #1 LBJ was a school teacher and self made man who came from a poor family in the Hill Country. He was of the mind that if he made it out of poverty, anyone else could too if they had the grit. He could have given a damn about poor, inner-city people. LBJ's War on Poverty was a democratic vote getting scheme aimed at minorities, not unlike what you hear from candidates yet today. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2008-02-21 01:24 |