If You Teach A Man To Fish

The world’s wealthiest man, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, has a simple message for bureaucrats and philanthropists about poverty.

Charity does not solve anything.

“The only way to fight poverty is with employment,” he said “Trillions of dollars have been given to charity in the last 50 years, and they don’t solve anything.”

This is one truth about poverty that the left is willfully blind to. They celebrate the working poor, bemoan their plight, and heap entitlements upon them with every election cycle. But they do not actually work to reduce poverty in America.

Instead they encourage poverty by subsidizing it. They placate the underclass by giving them just enough to keep them from becoming so uncomfortable in poverty that they seek to better their situation. They are kept firmly dependent on the state, and voting for the Democrat's from whose hands they are fed.

Do you think I am exaggerating? Welfare spending has grown more rapidly than any other expenditure in the federal budget. Faster than education, defense, Medicare or Social Security. Even after adjusting for inflation, welfare spending is 13 times higher today than in 1965. Yet despite 45 years of ever increasing entitlement spending, the poverty rate has remained virtually unchanged. In 1969 it was 12.1 percent, and in 2007 it was 12.5 percent.

Nothing is more important to raising standards of living and alleviating poverty, than private sector job creation. That is something the Obama regime is blatantly hostile toward. It has done everything it can to demonize wealthy entrepreneurs and thwart them with high taxes and excessive regulation. You just cannot create jobs when the federal government is out to get you.

We must encourage capital investment and the activities that create jobs, by creating an environment friendly to risk and wealth creation. That means lower taxes, less regulation, and fewer entitlements to get people off of the dole and back into the labor force.