Denny........
Yes , you have posted this before but........it does not take into account current correct political thought which teaches people they are "ENTITLED" to whatever the "HAVES" enjoy. If they do not have the money to buy it.....then it is the duty of the Government to tax the "HAVES" to provide the money to buy & give the people what ever they want!

I'm remembering what a retard (am I still allowed to say that?) I was as a youngster. So I did some janitorial work for peanuts, which overwhelmed my 50-cent-a-week allowance and made me feel rich. Had a "living wage" been mandated, nobody would have hired me.

Here's a hypothetical situation: Let's say you have a couple of minimum-skill minimum wage janitors who push brooms around all day. Then the nice people in government mandate a "living wage", and their wages are supposed to double. So the boss goes to them and says, "Hey, you two, it's your lucky day, your wages just doubled!" No, not exactly. That's the liberal wet dream. In the real world, the boss says, "Hey, you're both fired!" Then he goes and hires a single replacement for the two, so the company costs are the same, but the replacement is more skilled and can operate power equipment. Because it's now cheaper to have one expensive employee and a capital investment instead of two guys with brooms. The "living wage" eliminates the lowest rung on the ladder, because the jobs cost more than they're worth, and the motivation to eliminate them rises. Likewise, with cheap wages, hamburger stands spring up. Raise the wages and hamburger prices go up, and people start making their own hamburgers. I'm not heartless; I appreciate the ideal of a living wage. I don't want to have masses of people doomed to be at the minimum wage all their lives. But without that low rung on the ladder, there's no first step between being a retarded kid and joining the ranks of the employed.

They like the future "living wage" earners. They vote and disappear quietly when their usefullness is over.

A post from a friend "across the pond":

The Right Hon Prime Minister

Please find below our suggestion for fixing the UK's economy.

Instead of giving billions of pounds to banks that will squander the money on lavish parties and unearned bonuses, use the following plan.
You can call it the Patriotic Retirement Plan:

There are about 10 million people over 50 in the work force. Pay them £1 million each severance for early retirement with the following stipulations:

1) They MUST retire.
Ten million job openings - unemployment fixed

2) They MUST buy a new British car.
Ten million cars ordered - Car Industry fixed

3) They MUST either buy a house or pay off their mortgage.
Housing Crisis fixed

4) They MUST send their kids to school/college/university.
Crime rate fixed

5) They MUST buy £100 WORTH of alcohol/tobacco a week.
And there's your money back in duty/tax etc

It can't get any easier than that!

P.S. If more money is needed, have all members of parliament pay back their falsely claimed expenses and second home allowances.

If you look at Denny's three rules you'll also notice that many people who are living in poverty (and seemingly stuck there) have broken them.

No education. Too many kids too early. No work ethic. = poverty

Marksman2000 - And what I neglected to mention is that following my three rules would eliminate about 90% of the poverty in this country.

I agree with all three, but would add a fourth: do not try to emulate your parents' lifestyle (house, nice furniture, good car), until you are able to SAVE and EARN it. It took me years (and I had to start over after the divorce 16 years ago) to get these things; many young people want it when they're starting out, and get in tremendous debt to do it, which leads to many problems.

I did all three, and started over with almost nothing at 41, and am back to where I started. So it does work.

Elizabeth
Imperial Keeper

Yes, you wrote this a few times before. The first time, for me, was April 15, 2008. The title of the post was "54". You meant 54% of people graduating from High School in Atlanta that year.

You figured out (rightly) that a lot of people will end up in welfare. And you wrote your 3 simple rules to end poverty. It was (still is) so brilliant. You got over 60 comments.

That's when I told you that I was printing your post to add to my will, for my grandchildren. It's still with me, because I'm still around. But it's staying with my will. The little bit of money I'm leaving is for my grandchildren IF they get an education. No education, no money. Just my love.

I hope I'll live long enough to read them the article myself, when they are ten years old. It's a good age to decide to have a decent education to avoid poverty. And to have fun while doing it.

Thank you again for having inspired me to teach them well.

#3 is too short. Most of the entitle-ees know that if they have children, the government will make sure that they can "afford" them.

Money never cured poverty. Look at the number of lottery winners who are once again broke. Education and experience are the only cure for poverty and not the experience you get playing an Xbox while eating Cheeto's provided by the tax payers.

USMC2841 - Exactly! Liberals cannot seem to get it through their heads that you don't cure poverty by giving poor people money. You cure it by teaching them to get up off their asses and make money. My sister and I both grew up poor. We are now retired and we both have a net worth over a million dollars.

My first (real) job paid 75 cents an hour! I was 13, as soon as my dad found out I had an income he mandated that I buy my own clothes, etc. The upside for me is I got to buy Hang Ten shirts if I could afford them (remember the little feet?)instead of wearing what my folks got me. The downside was I figured out just how far a dollar would go! I learned to hit sales and how to do without stuff I wanted because I didn't have the cash.

Hey! Mebbe the gummint could use my plan! Oops, I forgot- the gummint only uses Other Peoples Money.

Good lord. Getting a pep talk about poverty from a sorority girl sure is demeaning. Especially her tone, so condescending.

"oh these people aren't poor, look, they own a microwave! Oh the luxury! They own a refrigerator!"

Lemme tell you a story about how "entitlement programs keep people poor"

Before my parents passed away when I was 11, we were very poor. The 90 recession hit my family hard as both my parents were laid off from their jobs at GE. Some free market!
My mother took work as a babysitter and my father did odd jobs as a handyman. One day he was fixing our roof and he fell, breaking an arm, several ribs and injuring his back. He did not have insurance because he couldn't afford it. Luckily, the doctors treated him and didn't deny him b/c of that lack of insurance. Thanks for public hospitals! He couldn't work for months, though.
The medical bills were oppressive, and forced them into bankruptcy. This is a protection from being jailed or having our home taken away for being a delinquent debtor.
We lived on my mothers 75$ a week, and the kindness of our landlord who didn't kick us out when we couldn't make rent. Our electricity was shut off for that entire summer. I'm not quite sure if they received welfare or not but I do remember food stamps. If not for those entitlement programs, who knows if i'd even had been able to eat.
The next year, both of my parents died in a car crash. My older sister was 24 and had just become the first person in our extended family to graduate college. She did so with government backed student loans and government need based grants. (entitlement programs). She got an entry level position at First Virginia bank making about 22k a year and immediately became my legal guardian.

Because I was orphaned, I received both of my parent's social security checks until I was 18. This entitlement program augmented my sister's salary to be us to able to afford a modest townhouse in Virginia. It wasn't in a very good neighborhood though, and local kids got into trouble with sex, drugs, and even guns.

Being of sound financial mind, my sister decided to buy rather than rent, and using a FHA loan (another government backed program to help the lower income folk), we bought a modest cape cod style house (with aluminum siding even!) in the suburbs of the newest high school in the county. I got an education, did my share of screw ups, got her hand me down car, and became the 2nd person in my family to go off to college.

I received financial assistance from (what else?) Pell Grants and Stafford loans to attend school.

Fast forward about 10 years.

I'm now finishing up my masters degree (1st in the family!), own my own house in richmond, and am generally doing well in life. I have primarily my sister to thank, she was and still is brave and amazing. You know who else helped us out? The government.

So all you guys that say lending a helping hand doesn't work, and "just let the free market fix everything"?

That obviously my family was just "mooching" off tax payer dollars and we were "lazy" and should have "pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps!"

We obviously let the "safety net" become a giant "hammock" and coasted off the taxpaxers hard earned dime, huh?

Yeah, fuck you.

Robin - You are the exception that proves the rule. This is how poverty programs were supposed to work. They were supposed to be, as LBJ said, "A hand up, not a hand out." I grew up poor as well. We had no medical insurance when my father had a severe auto accident. He was treated at a county hospital where the final bill was $5000 which my mother paid over time. This was before the gummint got involved in health care and forced up the costs. We were able to afford to go to the doctor's office without insurance because the doctor visit was affordable before gummint intervention.

What conservatives and libertarians like me are all pissed off about is multigenerational welfare, which has become a hand out to leeches and parasites like the people in Nawlins who were so dependent on the gummint that they did not know what to do when Katrina hit and their local and state gummints failed them. Of course the local and state gummints' failure was Bush's fault.

Due to welfare, the illegitimacy rate among black families is over 65%. What this "sorority girl" is pointing out is welfare is now a way of life for these people. There is no incentive to get off the dole and go to work. We have thrown trillions at poverty programs and we still have poverty. The only difference now is the poverty is more palatable. Why go to work when you can live off the gummint and live fairly well while doing so?

I have a friend who is a social worker and she told me the average age of a grandmother in the projects is in the mid thirties. There are no average age statistics for grandfathers since the sperm donor is usually nowhere to be found.

I'm hoping that when you grow older your idealism will get in touch with reality. Subsidizing poverty destroys lives and removes incentives to better oneself. You cannot solve poverty by giving poor people money.

PS: I'm glad that you had the incentive to better yourself as my sister and I did.