Sunday, March 21, 2010

Poverty Blog

Poverty in our nation has been consistent for over 20 years. Many have done things such as philanthropic strategies to combat poverty but little has drastically changed. Philanthropy is the effort or inclination to increase the well-being of humankind, as by charitable aid or donations. Many people have donated millions worth of dollars to help poverty. The real question is what can we do to finally put a end to poverty? Some famous people have said there will always be the rich class and poor class in society. Some people say we have a moral need to help the poor but why should the successful people HAVE to help them. A lot of the poor is people who didn’t work hard in school and caused their social economic hardship by not working. Some of the poor may have been just people who had bad luck and tried to be successful but most of them aren’t. Charity can help ease poverty and make their life a little easier but most of the time it doesn’t stop it from occurring. People need to fight poverty by preventing people from having to go through. You can do this by making more people stay and work in school to help improve their future. If they work in school they would get good jobs because they got a good education. Getting jobs would provide money and they wouldn’t end up in poverty. Some groups have been to fight poverty by sending in groups of volunteers building homes and other facilities in poor areas. Other groups have also provided essential goods that people are lacking such as toilet paper and medicine. Basic items such as these could help people in poverty drastically and many groups ask for donations of not only money but these essential items to give to the poor. Some people believe that to many relief effort, such as the relief for Haiti, is given to foreign people and need to be focused on Americans first. This argument is understandable because we provide so much relief for foreign countries instead of sending the relief to people in poverty in our own country. Some people say this argument is selfish but I think it’s a logical argument and can’t be just thrown to the side. The overall belief for this is we need to fix our own problems before helping others. This makes since but what would happen if we didn’t help other countries and all of the sudden something devastating happened in our country causing us to need foreign help. If we weren’t helping other countries why would they want to help us? Shouldn’t we help ourselves become completely stable first before helping others? So as you can see, the status with poverty and philanthropy is not a easy subject and has may sides to it. A lot of people argue where philanthropy should be focused and how much it should be focused on one area. New techniques are being developed to battle poverty but as of right now the poverty rate has been at a constant level. Billions of relief money has been sent overseas to countries such as Haiti and countries in Africa. Hopefully one day someone will create a way to fight poverty but not fight to ease it but a successful fight in stopping it.

1 comment:

  1. There is a few things that I would like say to qualify or perhaps even contradict this journal entry.
    First thing I must say is that I really don’t think 20 years is a good assessment of the existence of poverty: there are a couple of reasons. First is that the “war on poverty” (coined term by President Johnson) started roughly 40 years ago in the US. Second is that despite the official beginning of “the war on poverty”, I am sure that there were poor people before then (namely during the Great depression which happened over 70 years ago).
    Second thing is the vagueness of the citations. The “many famous people” who believes that classism is inevitable can be almost anyone. There are two types of these people: the Marxist, who believes that classism and poverty will always be inherent to the structure of our economy, and there are Darwinists, who believes that human nature itself is the cause of putting people into economic hierarchies. The “some people” who believe that we have the moral obligation to help the poor are people like John Edwards and James Gilligan. I just think having some antecedents to go with the pronouns would be a good idea.
    Third is that I disagree with the author’s singular focus on solutions and causations to poverty. Solutions such as schooling are great and are probably very effective to some degree, but that doesn’t address other, sometimes even more dire, causes of poverty. Things like the vicious cycle, economic instability, taxes, and natural causes all contribute to one becoming poor. Because poverty has many causalities it is very ineffective to adapt to a one thing solves all mentality.

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