Monday, May 15, 2017

The poverty meme

"The global incidence of extreme poverty has gone down from almost 100% in the 19th century, to 10.7% in 2013. While this is a great achievement, there is absolutely no reason to be complacent: a poverty rate of 10.7% means a total poverty headcount of 746 million people." https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty/

This progress wasn't made with Communism or dictatorships or street demonstrations, and it won't continue by taxing wealthy countries more to fight a mythical climate problem when that money could be going to address poverty problems today instead of sea level in 10 decades. We should have learned from the Rachel Carson debacle which killed millions of African and Asian children with still no solution for malaria while trying to protect birds and insects.

There are genuinely hungry people in the world and the USA, but what has lifted most people out of hunger and poverty isn't government programs, but innovation, technology, creative use of fossil fuels, the green revolution in agriculture and entrepreneurship. Someone living below the "poverty line" in the USA today has more material luxuries than the wealthy of the 19th century. Refrigeration, indoor plumping, flush toilets, healthy food, education, health care, sanitation, even smart phones automobiles and computers. Yet, the SJW only care about the gap.

People do make bad choices--we eat too much, exercise too little, smoke, drink, and are promiscuous. Government isn't going to change that. That's the job of the church to address moral and spiritual failings. Read the definition of "food insecure." Hunger in the USA isn't even relevant and is a meaningless word. The number of people living in extreme poverty fell by more than 1 billion since 1990, from 1.85 billion in 1990 to 0.76 billion in 2013. On average, the number of people living in extreme poverty declined by 47 million every year since 1990 (or 130,000 every single day). Violent crime is also down dramatically since the Omnibus Crime Bill. Who is driving the narrative that this is an awful, horrid place in need of more government control? I can think of at least two. 1) Democrat party, 2) the media.

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