Poverty my aching ass

G.O.C. has a good post up today about the issue of "poverty". I won't post the whole thing, but I will post a few tidbits.

The general tone of the op-ed is what a crime it is that the Forbes 400 richest Americans had so much money and the poor didn't. According to her the Census Bureau's poverty count of 35 million people is actually a lowball count.

Forbes 400 combined wealth rose 10 percent over the past year

I guess I must be doing sumpin' right because my wealth rose 12 percent over the past year. Which brings me to a Doonesbury cartoon in Monday's AJC. Joanie is bemoaning the fact that her portfolio declined 20 percent (Mine rose 11%) over the past year. She better fire her financial advisor, since one would have really had to work hard to lose money in the stock market in the past 11 months. But Joanie is a liberal so that could explain part of it.

The reason poverty exists in this country, for the most part, is that people are too damn lazy to get off their ass and work. While there are people who, for some reason or another, have been shit on by life and are in need of help, the majority of poverty stricken people could raise their life up of they wanted to.

I remember a few years back, one of my co-workers was complaining how another co-worker seemed to have more money that he did. I took him through the following exercise.

1. How much do you spend on cigarettes? The other co-worker didn't smoke.
2. How much do you spend buying coffee in the cafeteria? The other co-worker brought a thermos of coffee.
3. How much do you spend on lunch in the cafeteria every day? The other co-worker brought his lunch.

The difference was over $200 per month.

I roll my own smokes, and save about $60.00 a month just from that. I bring my own coffee to work. I bring my own lunch and snacks to work. Since I started bringing my own food, I've saved $80.00 a month. That's $960.00 a year, just by bringing my own food to work. I save $720 a year by manufacturing my own cigarettes. $1680.00 a year saved just by altering my lifestyle a bit. That's a lot of cash.

I realize that some people can fall on hard times such as a catastrophic accident or a prolonged illness. That is what welfare was designed for. But we have third and fourth generation welfare recipients. It has become a lifestyle. The Great fucking Society has bred a permanent underclass dependent upon gummint handouts.

The poverty rate hit its best mark way back in 1973. The 2002 poverty rate of 12.1 percent was 9 percent higher than 1973's. The 2002 child poverty rate was 19 percent higher than its lowest point in 1969.

Those are telling numbers. They show that the War on Poverty, after throwing trillions of dollars at poverty only made it worse. It also shows that the breakup of the family, which began at that time, also has contributed to the child poverty rate. There used to be a stigma attached to out of wedlock birth. But now that we have decided to be non-judgemental, illegitimacy has gone way up (over 60% for blacks) and with it the rise in child poverty. What more proof do we need that liberal social welfare policies have been catatrophic to the people they tried to help

Give people money to do nothing, and they will do nothing. Give people money for having more babies, and they will have more babies. Sometimes human nature is so easy to understand, but the liberals refuse to see it.

The Left seems to think that more government regulations will end poverty. They've had a 30 year crack at it, and they have failed. Miserably, horribly, awefully failed.. It's time they get shoved into the dustbin of history where they belong and let the grownups do the work now.