Greetings, Hatuey. :2wave:
I am not blaming him for the safety nets that are in place, since it's been law for a long time, and certainly needed. But what I don't understand is how poverty leads to criminality. By the world's standards, our poor are considered wealthy. They have cars, TVs, nice clothing and good food to eat. If our poor are envious of what others have, that's a personal problem. There are no good excuses for destroying what other people have worked for just because you're angry or envious, or feel a wrong has been done to you. It's a moral failing, IMO, but the entire world seems to be sinking into the same morass, and our leaders worldwide don't seem to know how to handle it, so what can we expect? Sad...
Pol,
You probably haven't lived a level of poverty where your food groups are grape soda and mayo sandwiches. However, that
does exist in our country and people make decisions based around it. Some people try their hardest and struggle for decades to get ahead. They work menial jobs, they take crap from ****ty employers. Some eventually make it out of that poverty and live what is referred to as the "American Dream". Others simply can't make it happen no matter how much crap they take or how hard they work.
In that second group (the group that doesn't get ahead), you have two kinds of people. The kind which continue trying and don't get anywhere and you have the group that simply decides to give up. This mentality is passed down from one generation to another and to a large extent, it's based on the real life experiences of people living in many of our inner cities. That kind of people is the kind that is responsible for a lot of the
criminality in this country.
So what we have is a multifaceted problem. The first is that yes, poverty diminishes the
possibilities of an individual. Secondly, it makes the easy (and trust me on this, they're pretty easy) profits of criminal activities. Finally, this mentality is handed down from one generation to the other.
With that stated, social programs do ensure that people are less likely to turn into criminals. They ensure that many people are kept away from the crushing poverty we saw in the
early 20th century when these programs didn't exist.
Obviously, this doesn't explain why so many in Wall Street have turned to criminality. The reasons why the rich engage in crime are vastly different than the reasons the poor do. However, in the end, the majority of poor people who engage in criminality do so because they feel it is a good way to survive. I'm not justifying it in any way, but I can see how and why it happens. This is the least convoluted explanation I can give.