Originally posted by Deepblue
You know what one of the biggest reasons for this is? It's addiction. Addiction to smoking, to drinking, or to drugs.
Do you have any actual evidence for this? Any proof of causality or correlation? And proof that - even if there is some link - that said addiction is the cause of poverty and not in fact caused
by the effects of poverty?
Originally posted by Deepblue
People need to take personal responsibility for themselves and take action instead of whining about how unfair the world is. That's just life, and life is tough.
And yes, I currently have two jobs.
It appears your approach is that everyone who doesn't have a job, doesn't want one. That people only become poor because they deserve to. That's complete and utter bollocks, and it's a sham of an excuse chosen simply to avoid addressing the social issues behind it, and possibly realising there are some hard questions to answer beyond blaming the poor for being poor.
And yes, the modern world is still unfair. Anything with that sort of rich-poor divide has some sort of inherent flaw - if the worlds richest nation has such a large percentage of people living in basic poverty, surely it raises issues about that countries fairness in terms of, say, access to education and employment opportunities?
The US has one of - if not the - life expectancy and child death rates rates of any modern western country. In 2002, 34.6m Americans were officially living below the poverty line, 31m deemed to be 'food insecure' (did not know where there next meal would come from). In 25 major cities the need for emergency food relief rose 19%; there are more now living in poverty than in 1965. Between 12 and 13.6 million are unemployed, underemployed in part time jobs out of financial necessity or have simply given up looking for work (the US government massages the figure by ommitting the latter 2, which most european countries count in calculating their unemployment figures).
More than 20 states lost over 20% of manufacturing jobs in the 98-03 period. Only 3 saw growth (none remained static; the rest all lost jobs). I don't need to mention that the manufacturing sector is a key employer of 'less skilled', i.e. less educated and usually lower class, workers.
And you think it's just down to individual laziness?
