POVERTY
IS A CHOICE:
How and Why Millions
Turn Their Backs on the American Dream
by
Joseph S. Bayana
SMASHWORDS EDITION
* * * * *
PUBLISHED BY:
The Institute for the Study of Succession and Continuity (ISSC) on Smashwords
www.greatesthchallenge.org
Poverty is a Choice: How and Why Millions
Turn Their Backs on the American Dream
Copyright © 2008 by the Institute for the Study of Succession and Continuity
Discover other titles by Joseph S. Bayana at Smashwords.com:
America's Greatest Challenge: Succession and Continuity
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Chapter one
Introduction
Are you ready to know the truth?
Chapter Two
History of Poverty in America
Chapter Three
Seven important facts about poverty today
Chapter Four
War on Poverty
WOP economics
Chapter Five
Why are you poor?
Chapter Six
Ten reasons why you are poor
Chapter Seven
The choices we make that cause poverty
Chapter Eight
Answers to questions raised by poor people
Chapter Nine
How to get out of poverty
Chapter Ten
The Final Frontier
The end of poverty in America: What Next?
Reality Bites
The No-Go Meter
Pledge to End Poverty
Notes
Bibliography
“There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it.”
William James, The Value of Saintliness,Lectures XIV and XV
There are only two reasons why you picked up this book. The first is you’re interested in trying to understand more about poverty and the dynamics of deprivation. That’s good. Either you’re an economist, a political scientist, a historian, or a person categorized into a discipline who 2just wants to expand his or her knowledge about the topic. Or you think the title was catchy, and you were curious enough to pick it up. It’s easier for a person in your situation to pay for a copy of this book and know its contents. From here, I have to apologize, and I have to say that this book is not intended for you. If you want to read on do so on your own volition.
You are not being discouraged. I just have to tell you that I wrote this book to directly help out poor people.
So is this a self-help book? Yes. The book is maybe for a few in my generation who are still willing to seek change for the better and achieve it, but most especially for the younger generation who might fall into the traps of history repeating itself.
Do I stand to gain reading this literature when I am not poor or deprived? Yes, because it’s one way for you to understand one of the most glorious abilities that all human beings possess – the power of choice. So stand back and observe. If you want, you can take part in changing lives.
You can go the traditional way and do charitable works , give money, clothes, etc., or get involved and inform people. I’m hoping you can do the latter. The best investment that we can make as a society is to educate others. With all due respect to those in the industry, education is the cheapest and most abundant human resource. It is also the most valuable. Generation after generation we have handed down the accumulated knowledge of mankind, about right and wrong, good and bad, beneficial or malevolent, and, of course, about poverty and wealth. There is no limit to harnessing the human potential. Two thousand years ago, one man walked the Earth and gave his ideas about life and God. We are still reaping the benefits of His wisdom today.
If you are poor or materially deprived, this book is definitely for you. I wrote it with you in mind.
Are you a homeless person living in the streets?
Are you a single mother working at two jobs, with three kids, living in a rundown apartment?
Are you an uninsured senior citizen carefully balancing your small monthly budget with electricity bills, the costs of food and medicine?
Are you a minority who just can’t get an opportunity or a job?
Are you an immigrant to the United States who can’t understand this book if it’s written in English?
There are many faces and there are even more stories.
This is all for you.
Obviously, if the poor is my target market I am not going to make a lot of money publishing this book. Similar to most of what’s written on these pages, it’s all a matter of economics. The first feedback I got when I intended to publish this book was, “Good luck making poor people read it.”
That is the reason why this book is part of the War on Poverty (WOP). I have a battle on a different front and education is my weapon. Ignorance is my direct adversary. For people to understand the choices that they make, they should know what choices are available to them. If you were asked to pick a number from one to ten, you must first know how to count from one to ten.
To understand poverty you must look at both sides of the coin. Its opposite, of course, is wealth. Between them you have the social classes ranging from the lower-income to the super rich. In its entirety, the poverty-wealth spectrum is all about economics – the allocation of resources. Those who have can get more if they want, and those who have little have to work more to get what they want. This is the essence of the ideology known as capitalism, i.e. you have money or an asset, and you invest it to make more money.
Let’s begin with the person who started the modern conversation about wealth, Adam Smith. About the same time the Founding Fathers were waging a war of independence against the British, Smith came out with An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. In it, he explained that a person must have a product or service from which profit can be derived (all endnotes will be as follows -- en#1, with their corresponding numbers). The accumulation of surplus profit will lead to wealth, and the absence of trade will lead to the absence of wealth. In other words, though Smith was saying getting rich still involved buying or selling, the money that you gain is based on how much you think you should earn. There was premium on merit. Assuming, of course, that you can make people pay the price for what they want.
That’s how, in one way, the means of exchange can be explained. Some of us think earning money is doing something with your left hand and getting a paycheck with your right hand. If you begin to understand what can take place between the transfer from one hand to another, you will begin to understand economics. Just don’t stop thinking because it gets more complex.
Here’s another example. A great part of our history looked at poor people in America as peasants, slaves, hobos, vagabonds, panhandlers, or some pejorative term that emphasized their low social and economic status in life. It was not scientific and measurable and was based mostly on observation. In those days, if you couldn’t earn a decent living, you weren’t worthy of other people’s respect, and they wouldn’t go out of their way to show that. Today, to make it easier for the academe, politicians, and decision-makers study people like us – the poor. They put us in groups, looked at our common traits, and found out we could be described with numbers. That specific figure varies depending on how the entire American economy performs. It also depends where you.re located and in which state. This is all about the pie. Some of us control the ingredients to bake it. Some of us control the amount of sugar or flour that goes into it. Most of the time poor people are just expected to eat it and not make decisions. If you want more of the pie, you have to learn and understand how to make better and sound judgments. Let’s begin with our situation.
Poverty is defined as members of the American populace who are incapable of obtaining the means to pay for the cost of a nutritionally adequate diet, together with a suitable cost of living, for themselves or members of their family. However which way you look at it the simple fact is, if one does not have three square meals a day, a permanent place to sleep at night, and decent clothing, one is deemed as poor (en#2). There was a time in American history these situations lasted generations, and it was the norm. At present we are aiming to cut it into a lifetime, or less. To be able to keep yourself from starving, staying in the streets and wearing rags, you have to have a source of income from a job or a business. This was what Adam Smith wrote about in principle. You have to allocate resources for yourself; in the absence of that you are poor.
During the past fifty years, in the course of trying to first alleviate then eradicate poverty in America, various economic measuring tools were devised and debates waivered from one side to another in order to update our political leaders and decision makers. They are continuously updated and the United States has one of the biggest, if not the most extensive, resources to study the issue of poverty and every facet that goes along with it (en#3).
This is another way of saying that some people can make money from the poor just by studying or deciding for them. The fact is the American economy is so big we can talk about poverty and still make money out of it. In most of these cases, we have groups of highly-educated people putting their heads together to get a slice of our characteristics and how we perform in our society.
These people come from organizations called think tanks.
They have most, if not all, of the necessary information to publish their findings on poverty. Or they do more in-depth research to get what they need. Take, for example, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Poor people felt the full brunt of the catastrophe when the levees broke. In trying to chronicle the aftermath of the disaster, their interpretation has the benefit of hindsight and simultaneously contradicted themselves in their recommendations(en#4). You’ll read about the irony of poverty in the following pages. At any rate, publications like this, along with thousands of others, become part of America’s stock knowledge to deal with poverty in the present or the future. The bottom line is, if you want to know more about your situation, there is a flood of literature that you can read about that ranges from sophisticated to the simple solutions. Here are other examples.
To try to explain why there are poor Americans, a survey was done. A small part of the population gave their opinions and ideas. Half of them said that you are a victim of circumstance and the other half said it was a matter of choice (en#5). In part, this can be proven by Robert Rector. He explained that poor people in America are not really, well, poor. They just don’t have what the middle and higher income classes have, but their material possessions explain their real situation in life as consumers (en#6). You can read more about these in Chapter Three.
And then there are case studies from people who are at the frontlines in the WOP: the charitable institutions, halfway houses, homeless shelters, and other non-profit organizations who simplify matters for the benefit of those they study or help. One such organization is the National Public Radio (NPR), which has a program entitled, Fighting Poverty in America. They have numerous articles serving as models for change for all Americans. Greg Allen wrote about people in Oklahoma who learned to save money as a deterrent against bad economic times (en#7); Barbara Bradley Hagerty mentions the role of spirituality in changing people’s lives in Florida (en#8); while Steve Inskeep spotlights the active role of the city government of Savannah, Georgia, in assisting with the plight of low-income residents (en#9). We’ve included Rachel Jones and her piece on the role of married couples working out their differences to prevent their children falling into poverty (en#10); and Renee Montagne writing about the significance of living wages, as opposed to minimum wages, to ensure a decent way of life in Los Angeles (en#11). These are just some of the success stories of how people overcome adversity.
Last, but not least, we can read about poverty from mass media, journalists, and bloggers from the internet. They are the most widespread providers of information on the issues involving poor people (en#12).
To ignore the available literature about poverty, some of which I mentioned above, means that you don’t want to change, and you want to stay poor. Most importantly, a great part of your knowledge about poverty will come from people who talk to you about how to change your life: social or case workers, volunteers, and teachers. They work on a case-to-case basis. They look at profiles in a manner that’s in-depth (at least most of them do), and they look at a person as an individual, not someone who belongs to a group. They know your first and last name, your habits, your likes and dislikes, your idiosyncrasies, successes and failures in life.
Most of them, at one time or another, were just like you. Now they can make better choices, for themselves and for you, because they are better informed. The people and organizations that I mentioned in this section of the book are just a small part of the industry that helps fight poverty. From their wealth of knowledge, experience and wisdom, they plan people’s lives. Society is their laboratory. From what they published, and the policies they formulated, decision-makers will arrive at a conclusion and take a course of action. Some are sweeping and some are selected, but all are intended to alleviate the plight of the poor. Some may not even be right and beneficial, but decisions will inevitably be made.
The bottom line is, these people are not better than you in any way, sort, form or manner. The reason they decide for us is because they have more information and resources at their disposal. We don’t.
In a similar way, if you have more information, you are better informed and can make better decisions. Here is where it begins. You’ve already made the first step in changing your life by reading this. Please don’t stop and continue to the end of the book.
Are you ready to know the truth?
In its entirety, this literature is a wake-up call. We are not giving an encompassing declaration, and we certainly do not hope to make hasty generalizations or non-sequitur arguments. We do not lay claim that our arguments are absolute. This is an attempt to explain what most academics cannot, or do not wish to, explain, what most politicians refuse to say in public, and what most Americans can’t say out loud because they’ll be accused of being heartless. We are not trying to be nice. We are not politicians. We don’t rely on pure academic reasoning.
What you are about to read is real. Though hundreds of thousands of years have passed, and we have evolved to a higher level of awareness about ourselves and our surroundings, some of us will still feel that the title of this book and the words written in it are without compassion or consideration. This basically means that some of us cannot face the truth. As the saying from philosopher William James goes, the “truth” is staring at everyone right in the face. The “lie” comes when people interpret the book and the title as a Fascist and Darwinian attempt to weed out the undesirables from society. I strongly suggest that you first read the book before you render judgment; the proverbial “don’t judge a book by looking at its cover” process.
Being poor in America, more often than not, is a consequence of decisions we made or others have made for us. If an impoverished minority, who already lacks the resources and network to overcome financial adversity, is told that he is wrong, does that make him feel better and safer? Is poverty a form of masochism? Do Americans feel better and safer by just turning away?