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Elimination of Poverty, the Re-establishment of the Middle Class

How To Eliminate Poverty, Re-establish the Middle-Class? Check all you agree with

  • Government funded higher education just as other industrialized nations do

    Votes: 28 68.3%

  • Cut out tax loopholes for the rich to benefit the lower and middle class

    Votes: 34 82.9%

  • Start disallowing outsourcing to other countries for lower wages

    Votes: 28 68.3%

  • Institute a flat tax

    Votes: 7 17.1%

  • Disallow those in poverty to have children

    Votes: 2 4.9%

  • This is not possible; we will always have poverty and no middle class

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • There should always be poverty

    Votes: 6 14.6%
  • Total voters
    41
M

MusicAdventurer

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This pole was spurred by a thread I read and responded to regarding the birth control and the poor.

This was the OP:

Dittohead not! said:
at least according to this Fox Newsie:

Does fair and balanced have to include rational?
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MistressNomad said:
Well, it is in a way. People having more children than they can financially care for is certainly a large contributer to continued and worsened poverty. Yeah, completely accessible birth control will get rid of a lot of the poor... by virtue of some of them digging their way out of poverty BEFORE they have kids.

I know, it's terrible. :roll:
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MusicAdventurer said:
This pole was spurred by a thread I read and responded to regarding the birth control and the poor.

This was the OP:
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My OP to this was:

MusicAdventurer said:
Regardless of whether people are able to find a way to beat the odds and get out of poverty, humans are, according to scientists, animals who adapt to their environments. One of the often drawn parallels between often seen reproduction strategies in other animals as compared to humans, involves the hostility of the environment.

Among non-human animals we see that the more hostile the environment is to the animal, the more babies the animal is likely to have and the less hostile it is, the fewer they are likely to have. For example, sea turtles lay enormous amounts of eggs as their babies must run the gauntlet of preying birds before they get to the ocean; additionally, they are very small compared to mature turtles when they hatch and their average life expectancy is low because they still have to grow into full sized adults without becoming prey to other predators in the sea all without the assistance of the mother.

On the other hand, bears, for example, have one (or two if they have twins) bay at a time as their environment is no where near as hostile as that of the sea turtle. There are no predators that target bears other than humans and the mother bear stays with the cub until it is an adult. So as you can see the more hostile the environment, the more children are birthed; the less hostile the environment the less children are birthed.

Some argue that among other things, the reason why humans have more babies when in poverty is due to a lack of education or access to birth control. However, in the U.S., where birth control is free and so is public education up to the 12th grade, we still see more babies born per woman in poverty than we do in wealth.

See the graph/links below showing the relationship between wealth and births:

wolfersimage012.png


http://www.freakonomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/wolfersimage012.png

Freakonomics » The Rich vs Poor Debate: Are Kids Normal or Inferior Goods?

What's the solution you may ask ... to me it seems relatively clear ... force the poor to keep their births low or make our environment less hostile, i.e. distribute the wealth in a more even fashion, making it possible for a lower class to be paid a living wage, re-establishing the middle class, while still allowing an upper class
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So what does everyone think? Do you agree, disagree or do you not care (if not, why?)
 
those are some strange answer choices

no middle class?

maybe there will always be poverty rather than there should be
 
TurtleDude said:
those are some strange answer choices

no middle class?

maybe there will always be poverty rather than there should be
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OK, TD, in all seriousness, you seriously got me laughing out loud on this one :)

I enjoy your usual cynicism

I off course wanted to see how many people want to push toward lower and lower levels of poverty .. I too am not sure if complete elimination is possible

So you picked "there will always be poverty"?

Now that I look at it I realize I should have had that be an option without the added "and no middle class" that's an oops on my part, lol!
 
TurtleDude said:
those are some strange answer choices

no middle class?

maybe there will always be poverty rather than there should be
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I'm glad at least that you don't think there should be poverty :)

While you believe there will always be poverty, do you think anything should be done to lower poverty levels?
 
MusicAdventurer said:
My OP to this was:



So what does everyone think? Do you agree, disagree or do you not care (if not, why?)
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There may be some validity to that. Very interesting. I am most interested however in addressing the political induced reasons and moral implications for the increasing number of poor in this country.
 
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Catawba said:
There may be some validity to that. Very interesting. I am most interested however in addressing the political induced reasons and moral implications for the increasing number of poor in this country.
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Yes I know what you mean ... its some of the reasons people allow poverty and consider themselves ethical people that gets me. In ethical terms, and as my my ethical professor used to say, its "fuzzy logic" - people need to have ethics that are consistent.

For example, if you say or believe you care about the people of the world and would like to see less suffering, why support causes that in no way help those that suffer? It's like saying, "I am against killing animals and sitting down and eating a steak". It's "fuzzy logic"
 
I believe that there should be government funded higher education. But then I believe that all knowledge should be freely available anyways. Also there is a correlation between those with higher education commiting less crimes. Always a plus imo.

While I do think that the loopholes that many rich get should be cut I think that that alone is not enough. I think that if we are to lessen the amount of poverty then we should be encouraging companies to hire people. We can do this via tax cuts based solely on the amount of people that a company hires or employ's. Admittedly not sure how to do this as eventually a company must stop hiring people or it cannot be sustained as companies are not able to continueally grow ad infinitum.

I somewhat agree with the option of not allowing companies to outsource to other countries. But I would first perfer to try and lure them back here by giving them some sort of incentive that would outweigh the higher rate of pay here vs other countries. Perhaps one way of doing this would be to not tax them at all (or a very small tax on them..say 1-5%?) on all exports while increasing import taxes.

I agree with a flat tax however that is only because I don't mind paying taxes. However a flat federal tax would NOT help people out of poverty. If anything it would keep them in poverty.

No way in hell would I ever agree to the federal government...or state government for that matter, forcing people to not have children....for any reason.

I do believe that there will always be poverty. That is just the way the natural world works. There always have to be the low man on the totem pole. The level where one is considered to be in poverty may change...but there will always be someone "lower" than someone else financially speaking.
 
The first three. Also, public works programs and universal health care.
 
Please tell me 10 of you were joking when you said "disallow people in poverty from having children."
 
The only real way to completely wipe out poverty is communism, but no really wants that.
 
There will always be poverty. We may hate to admit it, but it is impossible to eradicate.

As for the middle class, it's always there. Statistically, there is always a middle class, that's how bell-shaped curves work.
 
No, well. The 1% don't want that.

I still like the idea of shipping them all to an island, with all the toys and money they can carry, and then we switch to a new standard. Their dollar will be worth whatever they want it to be on the island, and we get our country back. BOOYAH!
 
BDBoop said:
No, well. The 1% don't want that.

I still like the idea of shipping them all to an island, with all the toys and money they can carry, and then we switch to a new standard. Their dollar will be worth whatever they want it to be on the island, and we get our country back. BOOYAH!
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We would ship out the good with the bad though. Sure, we would get rid of all of the rich people who are only rich because of their relationship with the government, but we would also lose those rich who are innovators and really provide great value to our economy. I would hate to lose that.
 
Juiposa said:
The only real way to completely wipe out poverty is communism, but no really wants that.
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It's worked out so great everywhere its been tried. No poverty in those countries.
 
Can't vote in the poll since there's no choice there I can agree with. First, poverty has always existed, in every country, in every period of history, always. I don't see how or why that would change now or in the future - it may be eliminated one day but not today and not tomorrow and not this decade or in my lifetime. Why the poor exist is a multi-fold answer and there is good work being done to minimize actual poverty (as opposed to government identified poverty based on income levels). Politically speaking only - the poor and impoverished as well as the lower middle class are an important voting block and are regularly held up as an excuse to continue to expand entitlements and larger government assistance programs or new ones. That some actually need help to survive is just as valid as some who subsistence almost entirely on government assistance and do not want to work, have no ambition to excel and is perfectly fine just where they are. Others yet, have lots of ambition, lots of drive but just got a raw deal. As with all things, a balance needs to be struck ---- constant expansion of new and existing entitlements and assistance is not the answer just as a total cut of assistance is not the answer.
 
phattonez said:
We would ship out the good with the bad though. Sure, we would get rid of all of the rich people who are only rich because of their relationship with the government, but we would also lose those rich who are innovators and really provide great value to our economy. I would hate to lose that.
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yeah most of the dem senators would be history
 
WI Crippler said:
It's worked out so great everywhere its been tried. No poverty in those countries.
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dead people don't worry about being poor. its the one way communist dictatorships make people equal
 
If America were to turn 100% communist with 100% perfect wealth redistribution today we'd all be middle class with $44,000 yearly income. With marriage we will have $88,000 yearly household income to spend. I'm not suggesting we turn to communism (pure communism is doomed to fail), but I'm saying elimination of poverty, at least in our own western countries is technically possible.

The problem is that many humans want more than other humans, or want something of a higher quality than what other humans have. This has always been the case. Some people may say, hey, I'm a harder worker than everyone around me, why shouldn't I get paid more? And this is true.

Now, what would be a better topic is:
"Should the weakest workers be stuck in poverty, while the best workers become the upper-class"
 
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rigormortis said:
If America were to turn 100% communist with 100% perfect wealth redistribution today we'd all be middle class with $44,000 yearly income. With marriage we will have $88,000 yearly household income to spend. I'm not suggesting we turn to communism (pure communism is doomed to fail), but I'm saying elimination of poverty, at least in our own western countries is technically possible.
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No we wouldn't. At least not for more than that one minute. Within days there would be those with $22,000 and others with $66,000. Now granted they all would be equal in the fact that many of the things one wants to buy aren't available at any price, but that's something different.
 
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Juiposa said:
The only real way to completely wipe out poverty is communism, but no really wants that.
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It's already been proven that that doesn't work.

There's no way to eradicate poverty. You can create all the social programs you want and take all the money there is from the people to pay for them and there will still be people who are so lazy and stupid, that they won't get off their ass and go get their government check.
 
The middle class as we see it now was never meant to last long term because its existence is owed to a consumer based economy. Since consumer economy is fundamentally why we are in so much debt, the middle class will shrink as economic policy needs to be reframed.

Our companies and government made a serious mistake when they moved all our capital to foreign soil.
 
There will always be "poverty" because someone will always have more than someone else.


Try to eradicate THAT and we will ALL be "the poor".



(poverty is relative, you see. Our "poor" in America today are better off than a prosperous medieval middle-class person, or half the people on the planet now, but still see themselves as poor because they're at the bottom. Also, attempting to eliminate income equality entirely or largely, would destroy incentive, stifle innovation and enterpreneurism and destroy the economy.)
 
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Well too bad you could only vote one for me it was a toss up.

Disallowing people in poverty to have children and disallowing outsourceing to other countries.

I voted disallowing outsourceing to other countries.

Even if you could disallow people in poverty to have children you would have to fight organized religion.

At least disallowing outsourceing would have more tax revenue and more money in circulation

However no mater what you do eliminating the last two lines of the poll some people will have to make sacrifices and take responsibilty.:peace
 
Temporal said:
The middle class as we see it now was never meant to last long term because its existence is owed to a consumer based economy. Since consumer economy is fundamentally why we are in so much debt, the middle class will shrink as economic policy needs to be reframed.

Our companies and government made a serious mistake when they moved all our capital to foreign soil.
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I agree with that post my compliments.:peace
 
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