There IS poverty in this country, no doubt about it. The kinds of examples cited by this author, if true, account for what, maybe one third of the "poverty" cases? That still leaves a lot of people living in poverty.
We can't ignore the fact it exists.
One cause... dropping out of High School. A choice. So what do democrats want to do? Throw MORE money at public education. Not the right solution. In fact there may not BE a solution because this is a choice that people make.
But it isn't always about choice. Sometimes bad things happen to good people. So I can't completely agree with this statement of the author: "Poverty is a choice. It's a behavioral disorder. Poverty, my friends, is a mental disease."
I believe that remaining in poverty for years might be as the author describes; but the condition of being in poverty is not always caused by such dubious things.
In my situation, during the Clinton recession, our income fell from $100k per year down to under $20k, but still the lingering bills with the higher salary. In my line of work, there WAS no work. It was devestating to us. We felt sorry for ourselves for a little while, as we are not made of teflon. My wife and I and our two kids moved in with family - we were fortunate to have family around.
That was our condition, our poverty, brought on by circumstances beyond our control.
I will tell this story to completion because it talks about a poverty that wasn't brought on by causes conservatives typically blame, and because our story describes a solution that didn't require liberal government involvement.
We refused to succumb. It was absolutely demoralizing, and we were at times fatigued with fear/dispair; but we refused to give up.
We paused for a bit; got our bearings. We inventoried our surroundings; defined our skills and the marketplace around us. We realized we couldn't keep depending on the old skills to earn a living, so decided to try some new things.
We were able to do SOME of the old work - but only on the order of maybe 10 thousand dollars a year income. This was enough to keep my skills sharp and maintain tenure in that industry until the economy turned around, but hardly enough to live on. We knew there'd come a time when those skills could be used again.
My work prior to the recession hadn't involved labor; but there appeared to be a need for commercial cleaning services in our area. So we started a cleaning company. We didn't need much money to do this, almost no start up, it was all labor, and we workded HARD. We hated it at first but we kept going, after midnight sometimes. At the same time we cut back on expenses as well as we could. We went after any work we could.
It was really hard but we kept going. We were smart about our business: Get long term, medium sized commercial contracts; stay away from piecemiel cleaning projects. The business grew, without too much marketing in fact, because (not surprisingly) no one really wants to do this kind of hard work. In fact the business grew to the point where it was making us around $60k per year.
Then something interesting happened - though we had actually thought it might turn out this way. As the economy started to turn around, my skills were once again in demand. I have my old job back, PLUS we have the cleaning company. The cleaning company will to grow and we have other people doing the work now. Our income right now is mid-upper $100,000 and I see no real limit.
That's all I have to say about that (Think, Forrest Gump). I'll just say we didn't buy the conservative "poverty is always a choice/mental illness" etc. argument; and we didn't by the "government is the solution" argument. We went about it our own way. We couldn't understand sometimes why things were SO HARD for us, but we kept going; and now we are better off than we would have ever been if there had been no recession or if we had accepted the pundits' take on poverty.
I congratulate you on making your own way. You took a risk and it paid off. Now I try to clean but I just suck. Anyways, thanks for the thoughtful post. I have afriend who had to start a window cleaning business asap and he is doing alright.