John Edwards cared about the poor as much as he cared about fidelity.
>>Take the lottery. Americans spent $70.15 billion on lottery tickets in 2014 — about $630 for every household in the country.
That just boggles the mind.
Worst habit is refusal to read anything but yahoo news or msnbc. Millions of social progressives refuse to pollute their safe space with reality. These are the voters that are destroying the world.
Great post!!
He forgot the ones primal bad habit: The morning to night belief that the government exists to take wealth from the producers and give it to the takers. Of course, this might be seen as an addiction rather than a habit.
As with *everything* else human, the standard distribution (bell shaped) curve comes into play. So, right from the very start, any discussion about poverty must take the SDC into account. So what does this mean?
1) About 5% of people utterly reject wealth in practical ways. They are either dissolute, with bad habits and addictions they *like*, or have at least no desire or will to change; have some degree of mental illness; or they despise wealth for its trappings and materialism, seeing it more as impediment; or perhaps they intensely reject its administration, the work that must be done to retain it, much less increase it.
2) The next group, about 12.5%, are contented with just minimal wealth, technically far below poverty line. As long as they have some place to live, even a trailer, food to eat, and some modest entertainments, they are happy.
Now add these two together, and you have almost 17% of the population, and most of what we think of as “the poor”.
3) It is also vital to consider this as *not* a permanent state of life, but a dynamic one, in which people can migrate to and from usually the center 35% part of the curve, the average wealth in our society. These are the people, like “working families” currently unemployed, who are the most sympathetic, and seldom stay poor for long.
4) A lot of people exist within the “shadow economy”, in which they deal strictly in cash, do not pay taxes other than sales tax, or deal partially in both the conventional and shadow economies, so appear less wealthy than they are.
5) Government has only a small effect, and then, to the most marginal of these groups. Most of its money is wasted, as both its conditions and methods are inefficient. At the same time its efforts are horrifically expensive.
the dumb lib sheeple will forever blame their problems on others more successful than they are because they are incapable of making good decisions.
My sympathy meter is reading zero.
Having children out of wedlock.
In case someone wants to read the results of the Brit Vs progressive Yank study ...
Fiscal policies and the prices of labor: a comparison of the U.K. and U.S.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40173-015-0049-2/fulltext.html