The headlines tell the tale, across the country we are warned that poverty, particularly child poverty is on the rise. We here that more and more children are growing up with limited access to the luxuries that most middle and upper class Americans take for granted each day.

And with these warnings come all sorts of solutions. Most solutions involve taxes, people like former Vice President Al Gore call for a tax on Big Oil, but they aren’t alone, any successful American enterprise is targeted for vilification purposes. Wal-Mart is only the most recent example.

We are told that we must increase social welfare spending; we must increase spending on education and health care and so on and so forth. In these national lamentations over child poverty one question is never asked: why are people with such meager earnings and living in deplorable conditions having children they can’t afford to raise, cloth and shelter?

Exactly who is the irresponsible one: Wal-Mart, who pays a high school drop-out 9.00/hr for a low-skill task like stocking shelves or the stock clerk who has 3 kids with another on the way? Why is it that the poor are excused from the irresponsible bad decision making, which perpetuates their cycle of poverty while the successful are decried? In truth there are certain circumstances beyond the control of most people which can and do lead to poverty, but the vast majority of children who are growing up in poverty today are the children of parents who were impoverished long before these children were born, which begs the question, why? A question, which is never asked. Instead, we are fed an endless parade of lies that government is the answer. We are told that increasing social welfare spending will alleviate poverty. In reality such programs create wards for the state as able bodied Americans become dependent on the state for their very existence. We are told that the European welfare model is preferable, which fails to explain why 1/6th of all German children live in poverty today.

The fact remains that poverty is primarily a derivative of effort (or lack there of) and focus. Those who focus on a goal and make the right decisions, such as not having children while earning minimum wage or staying in school, are destined to break the grip of poverty, while others are destined to pass their sloth mentality down from generation to generation.

Important Links:

www.athensnews.com/issue/article.php3?story_id=26133

www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/news/state/15569737.htm

www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060920/NEWS01/609200548

www.frostillustrated.com/news/2006/0920/News/005.html