Child Abuse Can Lead To Poverty

New studies show that child abuse can lead to poverty. Victims of child abuse have an increased chance of ending up in poverty than children from non-abusive homes.

“You can come from a family that has money but if they don’t treat you well, you can end up in a lot of trouble,” said Senior Research Fellow Dr. John Frederick.

Of course, many factors in people’s lives put them at more risk of poverty. Many aspects of our society unfairly hold some people down, which in turn can make them poor. Especially when denied equal opportunity at childhood, the average person cannot catch up.

We can try to fight some of the preventable factors that hold a child back, such as being abused or being born poor. However, we can only end poverty by finding a way to provide everyone with sufficient opportunity to succeed, instead of just leaving that opportunity to those people lucky enough to not face too many obstacles such as child abuse, illness, or a poor childhood.

In my opinion, we can best provide that universal opportunity by providing universal education, which we can do in the form of student loans. The education must include food, clothes, shelter and healthcare. A person cannot get a sufficient education while hungry, homeless or sick. The education must also include job-training and job-placement services. With a high-quality education including all those services, people can get a job (or start their own business) that will pay them enough to support themselves and pay off their student loans.

Remember, to truly escape poverty, a person needs to earn enough to not only pay for their current needs, but also to pay for their student loans (which include all the costs-of-living while getting educated), to pay for their retirement, and to pay for unemployment insurance. Some nations and states may have socialized some of those needs, which means a person may not need to pay for them in such places. For example, unemployment insurance is at least partially covered by most governments.

Yunus Criticizes World Bank for Failure to Cut Poverty

A recent AFP article reports that Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus criticized the World Bank for its failure to cut poverty.

On Sunday, Yunus told Bank President Robert Zoellick that the bank’s failure to modernize anti-poverty lending programs has made its work ineffective. Additionally, Yunus says that the bank needs to include input from the people that need help.

I have posted blogs about Muhammad Yunus for over a year, and before he won the Nobel Peace Prize. The man strikes me as a genius, and impresses me over and over again. His successful method for fighting poverty consists of giving micro-loans to poor people to help them start their own businesses. Muhammad Yunus has successfully empowered poor people and helped them get back on their own two feet.

Personally, I doubt the World Bank really wants to fight poverty. It seems to me like a corrupt organization that, if anything, works to help the rich and not the poor. The poor and oppressed of the world just do not have enough resources to lobby and gain the favor of powerful organizations like the World Bank.

Brenda’s Got A Baby

The following video shows Tupac Shakur performing his song Brenda’s Got A Baby, which tells the story of a 12-year-old girl from the ghetto who has a baby that she cannot support. The song addresses teen pregnancy and the lack of support for impoverished teens from their families, the government, and society. Watch it:

I wish Tupac still lived today. He has many other songs that address poverty and other serious social and political issues.

Tupac holds the record as the highest-selling rap artist. Drive-by shooters shot Tupac 4 times on September 7, 1996, and as a result he died 6 days later at the age of 25.

The song appears on Tupac’s album, 2Pacalypse Now, which you can buy from Amazon.

You can discuss teen pregnancy and Tupac’s music about poverty at the Hunger and Poverty Forums. It’s completely free, and all viewpoints are welcome.

Add Long-Term Solutions To Short-Term Programs

Many anti-poverty and anti-hunger efforts consist of simple, short-term acts of charity, such as soup kitchens or free-food picnics. Food Not Bombs, for example, often schedules public rallies where the volunteers provide food that everyone including the homeless and poor can come and eat for free.

Feeding a person a meal will fend off their hunger today, but it fails to provide a permanent solution. Obviously, people need their immediate needs met, or else they will not survive to ever escape poverty. For example, 18,000 children die every day from hunger.

Unfortunately, feeding them a meal will not solve the problem. If we feed each of those 18,000 children a meal today, we will then have 36,000 children starving tomorrow.

We need to include long-term solutions with our short-term efforts. The short-term efforts need to fulfill people’s immediate needs while simultaneously the long-term efforts help the people permanently escape poverty.

People can escape poverty through education and employment or business ownership. (The business owners often then provide more jobs for the others.) To permanently escape poverty, people need to get enough education that they can get a job (or start a business) that earns them enough income to afford food, clothes, shelter and healthcare, and also enough to pay off their student loans as well as secure their retirement. In places without socialized unemployment insurance, the person also must earn enough to pay for that.

We have a long way to go, considering that even in the United States millions of college graduates live in poverty, millions of employed people live in poverty, and millions of children do not have enough to eat let alone have sufficient education.

Anyway, we can start by making sure soup kitchens, food rallies, and such also include long-term help such as job-training, education help, job fairs, and such.

You can help suggest ways to provide permanent solutions for poverty in the Hunger and Poverty Forums. It’s completely free, and all viewpoints are welcome.

Inexpensive Nourishment

A major problem people who struggle financially face is that cheap foods tend to be unhealthier than more expensive foods. It is easier to find unhealthy foods on a tight budget than it is to find healthier foods. Additionally, poor people may have trouble finding enough food of any kind.

It is important for anyone who may one day struggle financially, or who may interact with people who do, to know some basic foods that can inexpensively provide good nourishment.

Some nutritious and inexpensive foods I have found are: pasta, milk (including soy milk), oatmeal, peanut butter, bread and cereal.

The main trick is to avoid foods that have little to no protein, vitamins or minerals. These types of “empty calories” include soda, candy and such.

While snack bars are often tasty and sometimes not even that unhealthy, they are often very expensive per calorie. You will not get as much nutrients per dollar as you will with some of the cheaper foods I previously mentioned.

It is important to try and include fruits and vegetables in your diet also, but they are often not the cheapest way to get calories in your diet. Take your time at the grocery store to figure out whether the canned vegetables or fresh ones are cheaper.

Do you have any suggestions of inexpensive and nutritious foods? If so, please post them in the Hunger and Poverty Forums. It’s completely free, and all viewpoints are welcome.

Tougher Welfare Rules Reducing Poverty

An article today from The Canadian Press reports that tougher welfare rules in Canada have proved effective at reducing poverty.

Generally, I oppose government-funded and government-managed welfare. Though, I do not want to abruptly abolish it, because many people and families depend on it. Of course, welfare helps cause this dependency. When we give people things for free, they become dependent on those gifts–much like a spoiled and overprotected child who never learns to take care of him or herself.

They tell us that if you give a man a fish you only feed him for a day, and that teaching him to fish feeds him for a lifetime. They forget to tell us the trouble that giving fish to a man can cause. If you give him the fish, he will never bother to learn to fish, and the other guy who is learning how to fish will stop and come ask you for free fish instead of learning.

We cannot end poverty simply by giving things away for free, and we cannot end world hunger by giving away food. At best, such methods will be ineffective. At worst, they will be counterproductive, by inspiring dependency and undermining self-sufficiency.

First of all, it may help to simply offer needy people loans rather than free gifts. In that way, we can enable them to get back on their own two feet without giving them charity. Unconditional charity is expensive and relatively ineffective.

Secondly, instead of just unconditionally giving poor people food, clothes, shelter and healthcare, I suggest we require that the recipients of the help either get education and job training, or seek employment. If they work at a job that does not pay enough, they either need to also get more education and skills training, or they need to look for a higher paying job. The point is that if the person can get a job that pays enough, they need to get it. If they cannot get a job that pays enough, they need to get more education so that they can get a job that pays enough.

If some people refuse to get an education or get a sufficiently paying job, then I suggest we refuse to help them. The only exception would be the few people who literally cannot earn their own income, such as the elderly, the mentally ill, and the severely disabled.

Supporting people in those ways will help lead to self-sufficiency and thus a permanent solution to poverty. Additionally, it will help us focus our efforts on people who are willing to help themselves, rather than wasting our efforts on people who are not willing to help themselves. To be cliché, we need to help people help themselves.

Andrew Carnegie said, “There is no use whatsoever trying to help people who do not help themselves. You cannot push anyone up a ladder unless he is willing to climb himself.”

In conclusion, I agree with the findings of the Canadian study. Tougher rules on welfare and charity can make them much more effective.

You can post your thoughts about my suggestions at the Hunger and Poverty Forums. It’s completely free, and all viewpoints are welcome. You can also post your own suggestions there.