No more talk about a "war on poverty"? GOOD!

This ridiculous Reuters propaganda is more bleeding-heart tripe. Reporter writes about politicians who are ignoring the poor, reporter gets a soundbite from Jesse Jackson (yawn), reporter . Blah, blah, blah. Instead of all but asking what government can do, truthful reporting would have exposed what government has done.

Government has tried battling poverty by creating low-income housing. "The projects" originally was just the literal term, but today everybody knows it as a synonym for crime-infested neighborhoods where poor people have become trapped.

Government has tried battling poverty by giving cash handouts to the poor. This succeeded only in raising new generations of "Black America" to be dependent on the government dole, instead of on their own initiative and skills.

Government has tried battling poverty by raising the minimum wage. But instead of increasing the incomes of those at the bottom of the wage scale, that only made some of them too expensive to employ. Young people looking for first jobs would stay unemployed (and as poor as can be), and sometimes they would turn to crime.

Government has tried battling poverty by enacting social programs, whose innate bureaucratic red tape, corruption and fraud consistently waste more taxpayers' money than could ever be put to good use. Egged on by self-righteous pundits, bureaucrats redistribute other people's money and typically help the wrong people anyway.

Government has tried battling poverty by educating young people from poor families so they can get good jobs, except that the teachers unions care only about getting more teachers instead of good ones (bad teachers are more numerous than good ones). It's also hard to get a good teacher to commute into the projects that government created. Then the bad teachers, politically correct and wanting to make their students feel good, fills young people's minds with nonsense, convincing them that the rest of America left them behind, and that it's government's obligation to give them a living.

So you tell me: would you rather rely on government, whose track record I have laid out here, or would you rather follow Ted Nugent's idea? The latter has said some great stuff, including this on Sean Hannity's show a few years ago: "You want a cure for poverty? Get a job!"

I was thinking earlier today, before I read this article after coming home, that so many people think that 40 hours' pay each week should suffice for their living. So many people don't understand that if your labor does not earn you as much as you need, perhaps you need to labor more instead of using government to coerce your employer.

If a $5 per hour job isn't enough for a single mother to sustain her family, perhaps she needs to work a second job, no matter what that hypocrite John Edwards says is "unfair." And perhaps she shouldn't have gotten pregnant in the first place, or at least have fooled around with someone who'd be more responsible for his own children. Those notwithstanding, perhaps children when old enough need to get jobs to help out the family. My father was a promising track athlete in high school, but he had to give it up to work.

And even so, being "poor" in America today is hardly what poverty used to be. My father's family was poor and could afford only the cheapest food in scarce quantities. Once his mother told him, "I'm sorry, there's nothing to eat." That is poor. Today, poor Americans are considered "poor" because they can afford a place to live and enough food to eat, just not all the niceties of a middle-class lifestyle.

Blogging has been light again. In addition to my day job tiring me out again and writing my Intrade (aka Tradesports) newsletter on the side, I caught a very bad cold at the end of last week. I said good morning to one of my friends on Monday. Her back was turned to me as I entered the office pantry and greeted her, and she didn't recognize my voice at all.

However, this is not France, so for about $20 worth of cold remedies, I was able to go to work and be nearly as productive. Hopefully my latest Intrade newsletter will be published tomorrow: last week I talked a bit of economics, and this week I talk a bit about statistics.