Should it be a goal for government/society to reduce poverty at any cost? Is it possible to eliminate poverty?

Now on to the real question:

What is the line of acceptable poverty in society? i.e. 10%, 5%, 0%?

Is this a fair question to ask when discussing policy initiatives dealing with social program aimed at poverty stricken people.

In a society like America I think that it should be a goal. The goal should be to have zero people in poverty while understanding the reality that this goal may never be achieved.

How do you define poverty? If you say no one is in poverty, what are the bottom 5% going to say?

As somebody who feels that government does have a responsibility to care for those who cannot care for themselves- I'm not sure I'd say "reduce poverty" as much as "reduce the negative effects of poverty as much as possible". End result probably looks the same, thought process maybe different.

I don't think poverty is something that is conducive to a specific definition. Poverty is America is different than poverty is Somalia. It's an evolving standard. I think Maslow's hierarchy of needs it a good guide though. As a society gains wealth and becomes stronger and more secure the more it should look inward and try and create a place where are citizens are stabilized and have an opportunity to work up that ladder to. In America we need to think about providing basic food services for the indigent and housing as well.

I suppose anyone can use what ever definition they want to answer the questions. I'll post the US governments definition for a general guideline, so we can keep it from getting bogged down in semantics.

http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/pover...w/measure.html

Quote:

The official poverty definition uses money income before taxes and does not include capital gains or noncash benefits (such as public housing, Medicaid, and food stamps).

But, I'm sure you already understood I was using poverty in a general sense as any definition of poverty can still lead to an answer to my questions.



I can understand this but I'm opposed to treating symptoms that do nothing to reduce the problem.

My answers in blue.

I would also eliminate all income taxes on money up to the poverty line, which would take the place of the EITC.

What ever your definition of poverty is, I think the definition is irrelevant to the question.

I'll restate the question:

Under your definition of poverty, what is the line of acceptable poverty in society? 5% of the population, 10%, etc, etc.

If people want to discuss if poor people are actually poor, start a new thread. Its not what I'm trying to discern.

~0%

We are trying to say that no matter what you do or try to define poverty as, there will always be people who consider themselves in poverty.

Barring the invention of some sort of pseudo-Utopia where everyone earns the exact same salary and has the exact same number of marbles, by definition poverty will exist and must exist.

How will I know that I'm rich if I don't have poor people to compare myself to?

I'd like to think even LBJ during his war on poverty understood that poverty could not be entirely eliminated in America. Nor would we want to seriously attempt to entirely eliminate poverty. For that same reason, I'd shy away from even naming a poverty rate % that makes it acceptable.

Rather than aiming at a specific number, I think that our focus should be in two general areas: (1) as others have mentioned, mitigating the causes of poverty rather than only the symptoms, and (2) preserving the "American Dream" & making sure everyone has a reasonable opportunity to take a crack at success, notwithstanding prior failures (obv with the exception of life sentence violent criminals).

I think we do the first one better than the second one.

No ****, I thought this should have to go with out saying but for you I will say it now.


It is understood from a logical perspective that it is extremely unlikely for poverty not to occur to at least a percentage of the population.

Ofc, if you insist on using a ******ed definition that makes this claim true, it's true by definition.

I'm confused.

I hope this view point will be as laughable to others here as it was to me at the time, but one of the toe-headed youths in one of my poli-sci philosophy classes was gassing on about how capitalism, carried out to its logical conclusion, will necessarily lead to one person having all the money.

I think this is a crux of the problem.

How can you implement a program with no reasonable way to measure the effectiveness? Is "as long as it helps one person" ideology really the best use of resources for the broader problem?

Except that we don't need a precise end-game target to measure progress.

At any cost? Of course not.

Second question -- not entirely

This is a silly question. The answer obviously is that depends on the trade offs.

If it came at no cost, the acceptable number of traffic fatalities would be near zero. But the costs associated with reducing traffic fatalities to near zero levels of course would be prohibitive.

Of course it's a fair question, but see above.

I'll help you.

When you have a system of government that encourages people to remain in poverty, you'll never eliminate it.

Without the "poor" there would be no "rich." There is nothing particularly controversial about this statement. If you disagree feel free to explain why/how it is inaccurate?

That is not so important as identifying there is a line and there needs to be reasonable cost effect analysis done instead of idealistically trying to help ALL poor people when implementing policy aimed at poverty. Which is where I stand.

I think you guys are dramatically overrating the difficulty of reducing poverty. You can just give people money, and then they aren't as poor any more. The reason poverty reduction programs don't work well in the US is that rich people don't like poor people, so poverty programs have to simultaneously be mean enough to satisfy the rich people while avoiding being so mean that they don't actually help anyone.