A Two Step Process That Would Do More To Alleviate Poverty Than The Entire “War On Poverty.”
“You will always have the poor among you.” — Mark 14:7
What a waste of time and money this will turn out to be.
Obama unveiled a new “big hearted” but “hard headed” US aid policy to push the poorest countries toward prosperity. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon launched a 40 billion dollar drive to save the lives of millions of women and children. Britain, China and Japan also promised more help.
But many leaders still accused wealthy nations of failing to keep their promises to provide assistance. Aid groups said millions would still die unnecessarily in the final five years of UN Millennium Development Goals (MDG) initiative launched in 2000.
The US and Europe have poured trillions into the third world in the last fifty years and there’s very little to show for it. Had we done absolutely nothing and left those countries to fend for themselves, it’s entirely possible that many of them would be significantly better off today.
This is the same problem we keep running into in the United States. Everybody wants to make themselves feel better by throwing someone else’s money at the problem, but what many people don’t seem to notice is that it seldom improves the situation.
Yes, it will cost money to fight poverty, but there’s a smart way and a dumb way to do it. The dumb way to do it is our current system. Here’s the smart way to do it.
1) Dramatically beef up the police force and allow them to swarm over crime ridden poor neighborhoods. There are a lot of things conservatives kvetch about paying taxes for, but cops? We like having more cops on the street. After all, the first job of government is to keep us from being robbed and murdered, either by foreigners or criminals.
The fact that so many poor Americans are forced to live in crime ridden areas is not only disgraceful, it creates more crime. Kids join gangs to protect themselves from other gangs. The gangs sell drugs and commit violence. The more people who join those gangs, the more people there are who end up in prison, and the more people who will be difficult to employ later in life. Moreover, businesses don’t want to move into crime ridden areas either; so it depresses economic opportunities, makes goods more expensive for people in these areas because they’re harder to reach, and it cuts down on the available jobs. In other words, crime is one of the big factors that helps keep poor people poor.
2) When you have crime under control, dramatically cut taxes for businesses that will relocate to those areas. That will provide jobs and drive down the cost of goods in those areas.
Granted, there are a lot of other issues that create poverty. The biggest factor is actually the decline of marriage. Poor education, the diseased welfare mentality that goes along with liberalism, and a victimhood mentality hurt, too.
But, if we did nothing more than crack down on crime and then encourage businesses to move into poor neighborhoods, not only would it help reduce crime, it would give people their pride back, dramatically increase the quality of people’s lives, and it would do more to reduce poverty over the long haul than the trillions we’ve given away in wealth transfer programs over the years.