What to do about it? I just wondered if anyone had any ideas about it.
1.
Child poverty cannot be segregated from parental poverty (unless the children are orphans). And parental poverty cannot be segregated from the underlying reasons for any city, or county, or country to be poor. The poorest countries are also the ones wasting money on useless warfare, and having evil dictators rob their countries blind.
2. There is more than enough wealth in every nation to provide every citizen with the minimum for survival (if not much more).
So poverty is not a result of lack of resources but how resources are applied (or wasted or stolen) in an economy, particularly by governments. While private greed is a spiritual problem, mismanagement of public resources can make a difference as to whether a city thrives or goes down the drain.
3.
The majority of governments are stealing from taxpayers and wasting the money taken in as taxes. For example. there should be no income tax on income below $50,000 per annum, nor on hard-earned savings. There should be no sales tax of fuel, which is an essential (along with other necessities).
4.
Although this will never happen, spending decisions should be taken out of the hands of self-serving politicians altogether, and given to independent bodies whose sole business is to manage taxpayer funds responsibly, so that spending is always within budget, and there is no public debt whatsoever. [Note: I managed almost two dozen large condominium and rental properties for many years, and
generally we were always within budget. I did the budgeting as well as the day-to-day management of resources].
5.
Government expenditures should be restricted severely to cover only infrastructure, utilities, public safety, national security, administration of justice, disaster relief, veteran relief, and the management of public lands. All other programs should be run by the private sector.
And there should be a waste elimination task force for every level of government. It is entirely possible that at least 30% of all resources are being wasted. What is invested in military expenditures should be watched carefully. And
all foreign aid should be immediately cut off, since it has never benefited the neediest.
6.
One of the government expenditure items should be for poverty elimination -- carefully assisting those with incomes below a certain threshold to obtain reasonable housing, jobs, child care, as well as employment training and eventually decent jobs. Those who are helped to become steady wage-earners will address their own poverty, and their children will not suffer. And if the government does not steal their wealth through taxes and artificial inflation, they will prosper.
7.
All welfare recipients must be asked to earn their income (unless disabled), which means that real jobs (and training) should also be available. No one should sit around and collect welfare. The goal of any kind of welfare assistance must be to put people into productive jobs and out of welfare. At the same time welfare should not allow people to take money and waste it on drugs, alcohol, tobacco, or any non-essential items and frivolous items.
8.
There must be a reasonable ceiling on the salaries of government employees and politicians, and they should not be given lavish publicly funded pensions at all. They all should be required to have their own pension plans, life insurance, etc.
9.
There should be a flat income tax of ten percent of the gross income of an individual or business (including major corporations) with absolutely no tax breaks, deductions, or exemptions. But severe penalties for failure to pay the fair share of taxes. This would eliminate any kind of *tax code* and keep things simple and efficient. This would also generate more than enough income to cover all expenditures. The more money people have in their pockets, the more they have to put back into the economy or into investments.
10.
Every employer must be required to set up a pension fund for every employee (which must be invested properly to give a return of at least 5% tax-free). Governments should be excluded from social security management, since they habitually mismanage funds. But employers and self-employed people should be required to have pension plans.
11.
Christian churches should focus on food banks, widows, orphans, and the disabled, to ensure that these groups are allowed to live in dignity while receiving Bibles and Gospel tracts.
12.
Politicians should be expected to be productive or be fired for wasting their time and public resources. Most of them would be fired from regular jobs. What goes for government today is a farce, and little or nothing productive is done. Which means that there is a fundamental flaw in the meaning of government (which really should be governance). Government should no longer be bogged down in unnecessary legislation when effective administration is the actual issue. The War on Poverty was a bust, and so was the War on Drugs. As for the justice systems, they should rightly be called the injustice systems.
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