Left-leaning intellectuals and politicians who sometimes believe they are one and the same, like to tell you that poverty is a moral issue. I'm not sure how morality will solve the problem, but they seem to equate morality with spending government money on handouts. It also makes the assumption that the rest of us are an immoral people and don't really care about our fellow human beings.
The simple truth is that from the beginning of time, mankind lived in abject poverty. Our entire existence consisted of trying to find food and shelter. It often meant that we followed food sources as they migrated to follow their food sources. But interestingly, at some point some segments of the human race figured out how to get out of poverty.
They not only figured out how to control food sources by planting food producing crops but also by domesticating animals that we liked to eat. By spending less time on finding food we now have the ability to construct permanent shelters that provided better protection against the elements and other things on earth that were trying to kill us, animals or other men.
That also meant that we had time to begin using technology to make our lives easier. To find ways to cure illness. We began to explore the world around us and learned how it worked and why it worked that way.
Rather than teaching kids that poverty is a moral issue we should teach the history of how these different societies were able to get out of poverty and create better lives for themselves and others. We should be teaching them the skills they need to succeed in life and I don't mean how to identify a parallelogram as compared to a rhombus. At a certain point we should be teaching them about things like insurance, taxes, economic and business principles, how to buy a house or a car, or get a loan to start a business.
That education would help to alleviate poverty and the lower middle class. It would elevate the economic system for everyone. To be sure, there will always be people that live in relative poverty. People who are at the poverty level in America have a much better life than people who are in Africa or Central America living in true poverty-stricken conditions. No system, no morality will ever alleviate reality poverty. But we can elevate the standards so that relative poverty will provide acceptable living conditions for those at the bottom of the economic scale.
