Illiteracy Still Plagues Society

Today I want to highlight the relevancy of literacy to poverty. Obviously, illiteracy leads to poverty, because illiterate people cannot get good jobs. In fact, 43% of people with the lowest literacy skills live in poverty.

Unfortunately, illiteracy still plagues society. For example, more than 20% of adults in the United States read at or below a fifth grade level, meaning that they read far below the level needed to earn a living wage. The National Adult Literacy Survey found that over 40 million Americans age 16 and older have significant literacy needs.

Almost nobody would choose to remain illiterate and poor. We need to make sure that everybody has the opportunity to get an education, and thus get a job that pays them enough to survive comfortably. We can do this fairly through student loans.

Individually, we can each help promote literacy in our own community. For example, we can volunteer at libraries, or host youth book clubs.

Housing First

Florence Graves and Hadar Sayfan recently wrote about “housing first,” a new approach to end homelessness. I include an excerpt:

In the past, society’s approach to homeless people with chronic health problems such as addiction has been governed by tough love: Stay in treatment, or you don’t get the opportunity for publicly supported housing. People who could not confront their addiction, the thinking went, could not handle an apartment.

But a new approach, called “housing first,” is gathering momentum. The idea is to target the most difficult cases — the chronically homeless who make up between 10 and 20 percent of the homeless population and spend years cycling between the streets, shelters, jail cells, and emergency rooms — and give them apartments without requiring them to get sober, in the hope that having a place to live will help them address their other problems. More than 150 cities or counties around the country already have programs of some kind or plans to initiate one, and last month the Massachusetts Senate Ways and Means Committee recommended doubling the size of a small pilot program in the state. If the pilot succeeds, proponents say it could force dramatic changes in homeless policy — and a recognition that the current shelter system, built on what they call a punitive moralism, has fundamentally failed.

Read entire article by Graves and Sayfan.

The traditional ways of fight homelessness and poverty have failed, so we do need to find new ways. However, I fear giving people unconditional housing assistance. If we give people housing regardless of whether or not they try to fix their own problems, then these people have no reason to fix their own problems.

We cannot realistically expect a person to fight off addiction and fix their problems if they live on the streets. So, it does make sense to get them housing assistance first, but we need to end the assistance if these people do not do what they can to fix their own problems. If they stop attending treatment facilities, then we need to stop giving them housing assistance. Let’s focus our resources on the people who want to help themselves.

$400 Haircuts While Children Starve

When a man worth $30 million claims to oppose poverty, I find myself trying to balance the comedy with frustration. I want to laugh and scream at the same time.

John Edwards portrays himself as a champion of the poor, but the man spends his money on $400 haircuts. He lives in a 28,000 square-foot mansion. He has every right to overindulge as such, but that makes him selfish and materialistic, not anti-poverty.

A man who truly opposes poverty wouldn’t waste $400 on a haircut. Imagine how many children we could feed with $400!

Edward’s news-hogging organization, the Center for Promise and Opportunity, raised $1.3 million in 2005. While a significant amount of money to most of us, it seems trite considering that John Edwards owns $30 million, and more importantly considering that the main beneficiary of Edward’s “charity” was Edwards himself.

Like all politicians, we cannot trust John Edwards. These politicians merely use causes to gain votes. John Edwards does not care about fighting poverty any more than George Bush cares about keeping the U.S. safe. The former just uses the “war on poverty” to gain votes and to cover his true motives, and the latter uses the “war on terrorism” for the same.

These rich politicians live in powerful luxury. They don’t struggle and suffer like the rest of us. They have no interest in actually changing the system, because they like the current system; they like the status quo. They like it, because they benefit from it, at the expense of the rest of us.

Please tell me what you think about this at the Hunger & Poverty Forums, in the following topic: John Edwards’ Hypocrisy

We Must Consider Cost of Retirement

Often when posting on this blog, I refer to the general needs of humans. I usually mention food, clothes, shelter, and healthcare. While those four general categories tend to cover the vast majority of what any given human needs, they do not cover everything. I often fail to mention the need to secure one’s retirement.

For example, if a working man earns enough income to pay for just his current food, clothes, shelter, and healthcare, we cannot truthfully call that man self-sufficiently non-poor, because that man will one day lose his ability to work. He needs to earn enough now to pay for his living expenses later, when he retires.

To accurately measure the cost of living, we must include the cost of maintaining a proper retirement fund.

These retirement costs could come in many forms, just as housing costs can come in many forms (e.g. rent vs. mortgage payments). For example, a person may own a retirement account in a bank or a 401K. In another example, a person may buy some type of retirement insurance, where the person pays a fee to a company during the person’s working life, and the company pays the person for the remainder of their life after retirement. In yet another example, some cultures make it so the younger generation of a family takes care of the older generation of that family; the costs remain essentially the same.

When calculating a general cost of living, we can of course find the basic price for the general costs of securing one’s retirement. In other words, we don’t need to worry so much about each specific way to secure one’s retirement. In analogy, we use a general cost of food to calculate the cost of living, we don’t worry about the specific store from which any given person may buy their food.

Kindergartners Help Fight World Hunger

Kate Bolduan recently wrote an article about kindergartners helping fight world hunger. I include an excerpt:

Students at Raleigh’s Brier Creek Elementary scooped, weighed and bagged thousands of meals.

It was part of Operation Share House, an international effort to stop world hunger.

Once the meals are assembled and the boxes are packed, the meals will be shipped overseas. In about a month, the meals will feed 4,000 children in Nigeria.

Read entire article by Kate Bolduan.

While it remains a shame that world hunger persists, I think we can all agree on the beauty of these children helping to put an end to it.

I believe those types of programs help children learn more than their regular school activities, because the children actually get to see what it feels like to help make their own world a better place. These children actually make a difference. They will feed 4,000 other children!

I hope these young children feel very proud, because they deserve to feel proud.