This is it in a nutshell! Good work ethics, proper/healthy attitudes towards others and to themselves, study/learning habits, have to be taught. Most of the time they have to be instilled, starting at an early age for the best results.

Parent’s who do not acquire these skills or never had an environment allowing them to obtain them, only pass on the (*)(*)(*)(*)-poor attitudes and bad ethical behavior to their young. Poor people seem to have a lot of young, so the odds are pretty evident that there are going to be future generations of lackluster candidates to share/pass their own life experiences on!

Rationalizing that everyone has the same opportunities does nothing to identify the real problem or fixing it. It just makes some folks feel better about some of the advantages they might have had that led them in the right direction, or to dismiss the fact that they had everything given too them on a silver platter!

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There are only two things wrong with this great nation of ours, democrats and republicans!

Not necessarily in that order.

Causes: Broken Famiy, Lack of Proper education, Ghettos, War on drugs.

Solutions: End war on drugs use the funds for Drug rehabs and education, stop putting young kids trying to get by in jail and creating a criminal class.

Increase drastically ammount of spending on education, allow School vouchers, and Charter schools giving parents more choices.

Put more emphasis on Family values, on responsibilty for your actions, etc in schools.

Increase section 8 program for 2 parent households, make it beneficial for couples to stay together and provide a solid foundation to their children.

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"True Freedom is the Freedom to oppress others"

Ideology: Self Preservation.

Exactly! But being in good health as a janitor in America is pretty difficult. You know how much it costs to fix a toothache these days?

You should be able to work as a janitor and be able to afford health care and the raising of a family. If you can't, that will inevitably have negative consequences for the economy as a whole.

I work as a credit card collector, here is a short story of how we facilitate poverty:
Cardmember calls in saying she never used this acct or signed up for it. Her niece got ahold of her social and opened the acct up in her name. But she doesn't want to press charges cause that would be bad on her niece's record and she'd go to jail.

Fail. You just told her that its ok cause you'll clean up her messes. Enjoy this the next time she uses your social to steal thousands of dollars from you. (and as a note, the lady felt that because she didn't make the charges, she shouldn't have to pay either, lol, wrong)

This relates due to the following:
People use welfare cause its there.
There are not enough restrictions or time limits on public assistance.
Apparently, some people lake pride and responsibility.

If it were a whole lot harder to get welfare and if it had a time limit and you had to prove you were working on changing your life style, omg, less people on welfare.
I know that not all people aren't trying, but a lot of them don't.
And unfortunatly, it needs to be a universal system.

The difficulty is actually creating a system that protects itself from being taken advantage by others while at the same time does not risk leaving people out who are legitimately in need of the system. It's easy enough to say implement time limits and prove they are working to change their life style, but those are just broad ideals for which the actual attempt to implement might be more expensive than simply letting some people abuse.... it's a balance, and I'm not saying we're at a good balance either. Just saying it's more complicated than the broad ideals you are suggesting.

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True knowledge exists in being aware of what you don't know.

You have to understand that in my post that you quoted hereinabove, I was trying to explain things in the simplest possible terms to a liberal who couldn't understand that people would choose poverty. What's the difference? I was trying to explain that even though people don't directly choose poverty (by publicly declaring, "I hereby choose poverty!"), they can choose poverty indirectly (by making stupid decisions that lead to poverty), even though they might not understand that such a decision is choosing poverty.

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Theodore Lamar Heiks
BA, History/Political Science, Western State College of Colorado, 1984
MBA, Entrepreneurship/Marketing, City University of Seattle, 1993

*You must spread soem reputation around beofre giving it to Oxymoron again*

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Individuality is the aim of political liberty. By leaving the citizen as much freedom of action and of being as comports with order and the rights of others, the institutions render him truly a freeman. He is left to pursue his means of happiness in his own manner.
– James Fenimore Cooper