Would you like to know the answer to this question? Well, I’ll tell you!
In my last video, I addressed comments made by JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon that he would tax the wealthy “a little bit more” to alleviate the problems of the poor. I asked and addressed who he means by “The Wealthy” who should be taxed more to solve these problems.
Here I address whether money is actually the solution for the problems that the poor face, and whether his premise even makes sense or is accurate.
Here is the testimony of an economic expert who studies poverty that lists the three-pronged “cure” for poverty mentioned in my video.
This is a long, dense read, that I don’t necessarily recommend taking the time for, but here is a very important nugget from this testimony that is quite frankly the “Magic Bullet” for poverty that we’ve been looking for. I find it strange that these three factors are virtually unknown to anyone and almost never talked about. We should be talking about them constantly if we want to help people make their lives better and reduce overall poverty. Everyone in America, especially all politicians and policymakers, as well as people who are interested in politics, society, and the good of mankind should know and talk about these three factors whenever helping the poor and alleviating poverty come up.
Strategies to Reduce Poverty
Although the dramatic increase in federal spending has not led to an overall reduction in the nation’s poverty rate, at least two strategies have been successful in reducing poverty within specific demographic groups. Both should be considered major successes of the nation’s social policy and both could be extended. The first is to give money to people who are not expected to work and the second is to use welfare policy to strongly encourage work and then to subsidize earnings because so many of the poor have low skills and often cannot earn enough to escape poverty.
Before reviewing these and other strategies for reducing poverty, I want to emphasize the importance of individual initiative in reducing poverty and promoting economic success. My Brookings colleague Isabel Sawhill and I have spent years emphasizing the importance of individual responsibility in reducing poverty and increasing opportunity. One of our arguments, based in part on a Brookings analysis of Census Bureau data, is that young people can virtually assure that they and their families will avoid poverty if they follow three elementary rules for success – complete at least a high school education, work full time, and wait until age 21 and get married before having a baby. Based on an analysis of Census data, people who followed all three of these rules had only a 2 percent chance of being in poverty and a 72 percent chance of joining the middle class (defined as above $55,000 in 2010). These numbers were almost precisely reversed for people who violated all three rules, elevating their chance of being poor to 77 percent and reducing their chance of making the middle class to 4 percent. [25] Individual effort and good decisions about the big events in life are more important than government programs. Call it blaming the victim if you like, but decisions made by individuals are paramount in the fight to reduce poverty and increase opportunity in America. The nation’s struggle to expand opportunity will continue to be an uphill battle if young people do not learn to make better decisions about their future.
Here is a discussion about some other aspects of poverty from the esteemed economist Thomas Sowell.
Here is a blog post where I talk about the value of economic thinking generally, as a way to see things more clearly on a topic like this.
Symposium 