We Need A New Bipartisan Contract With America That Recognizes The True Definition Of Poverty ©

Economic poverty is not a condition of income, or assets, or victimization, or repression, or deprivation.  All of these conditions are symptoms of poverty. Treating economic poverty as a condition has never reduced it because this approach does not consider the affected individual as an actor and addresses only the symptoms affecting him. Defining poverty as a condition would imply a permanent requirement for dependence and charity and never leads to a holistic strategy for poverty reduction. Wikipedia's definition of poverty runs for about four pages enumerating every conceivable form of deprivation. All of it is completely annotated. All of it is completely wrong!!!

“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
Dr. Wayne Dyer

The true definition of economic poverty is the inability of the individual to create value for himself and for others.   

Value creation is the satisfying of needs or wants of individuals and organizations. 
In essence, most value creation is in some way service to others.

Our dangerous national debt today is the result of too many people consuming value and not enough people creating it. The main causes are a Laissez-faire approach to globalization that has hollowed out the high value added sector of our manufacturing enterprise base and has in effect created a reverse tariff of tax losses. We highly regulate how manufacturers must function but we do not regulate our domestic market to balance our trade account. As a result we flush manufacturing out of the country and ship the products back in. Other causes are massive oil imports, under educating and under motivating our young, an overly complicated and loophole ridden tax system, political drivers for over committing entitlements, two long term land wars in the middle-east, a failure to provide transparency and competition in medical care costs and a failure to prevent Alzheimer's disease which is the single largest driver of increasing health costs.

If society has any obligations to individuals, they must include helping to empower individuals to create value. We all have the inalienable right to be empowered to create value.

A holistic approach to poverty reduction would recognize that every individual requires five resources to be able to spontaneously create value: 

1. Attitude/Motivation,  
2. Knowledge,  
3. Enterprise, 
4. Hygiene/Health,
5. Security. 

1.     Attitude/Motivation:  We need to instill in our young that, to a great extent, their long-term happiness and wellbeing are directly related to their future ability to create value.  Our kids should know that two of the most valuable things that anyone can possess are a positive attitude and persistence. They should be provided with a learning environment of more than one problem-solving project at a time that they can develop a passion for. And then let them alternate between these projects if solutions do not come immediately to encourage them to create problem-solving ideas and score high on Torrance’s creativity index.  They should be conditioned to strive and to achieve because their primary emotional reward will be the internalized feeling of adequacy, self worth, and service to others.  They should learn about Maslow’s need hierarchy and the power of delayed gratification and intermittent rewards.  The ELI, E-City, and Junior Achievement organizations help our youth to venture into value creating activities while most still have the security of family support.  These organizations should be used as resources to the greatest extent to condition our kids to succeed in creating value.  Our kids should also be taught negotiation skills so that they fairly benefit from the value they create.   This country was built on the backs of immigrants and other people who were motivated simply by the fairness of being able to enjoy the rewards of their own making.  Treating poverty as a condition causes misdirected attempts to remedy it by taking value from its creators and giving it to those who did not create value.  This de-motivates both value creators and value receivers and naturally reduces total value creation.

2.     Knowledge:  Knowledge is the sum of education, training, experience, and associations.  Education is the key and yet we allow huge festering sociological holes to be created by our large urban over-consolidated school districts where graduation rates are less than 50% and where the primary beneficiaries are the administrators and the unions.  There is no economy of scale in 50% graduation rates.  First we should quarantine the kids who disrupt, threaten, and violate the rights of those who are trying learn.  Second we should deconsolidate large urban school systems into smaller neighborhood systems with no more than 10,000 kids.  Smaller school systems have fewer levels of bureaucracy and are more responsive and approachable for parents.  Then we should offer State wide public vouchers so that the districts can compete head to head for enrollment and drive the continuous improvement of educational achievement.  We are the only industrial nation that locks our kids into school districts based upon postal code. The State would have to subsidize differences in per student funding between districts. Most failing large urban school districts are already heavily state subsidized and spend more per student than more successful schools. Subsidizing vouchers would be less expensive than the costs of welfare and incarceration. Rules for transfer between districts would include maximum annual enrollment changes and student return policies. Also we would not be prosecuting parents for trying to get their children into better school districts. In our high school counseling, we should focus adequate importance on higher value added and higher paying careers in skilled trades such as designers, machinists, tool and die makers, and weldors that are presently in short supply.

3.     Enterprise:  Enterprises are the vehicles that provide the resources with which individuals create value.  Either the individual creates value within someone else’s enterprise or he creates his own enterprise. The primary cause of the shortage of higher value creation enterprises is our inability to properly manage globalization based upon strategic self-sufficiency in the very portable manufacturing and IT sectors.   We blindly subscribe to "Free Trade" without understanding the real costs and the imbalance of the international market that is skewed against our market. As a result, we have a hollowed out economy and this changes all of the rules including the effectiveness of Keynesian economics and results in a reversed tarriff. We can no longer afford a Laissez-faire approach to strategic manufacturing enterprises moving off shore. As a nation, when we consume value made elsewhere without exporting commensurate value, we become 14 trillion dollars poorer. We have heavily regulated and taxed our domestic manufacturing and are driving it to foreign shores to competitively reduce costs. Then we import the manufactured products from these foreign shores into our unregulated domestic market and have them compete with domestic production which almost always looses. The simple answer is that we need to regulate our domestic market on a quid quo pro basis with all countries so that we import equal value to what we export. Using a Keynsian multiplier of twenty, the 700 billion dollar trade deficit has resulted in the loss of 60 million jobs in this country along with all of the lost tax revenue, both personal and corporate. This has resulted in an annual Federal tax loss of more than 400 billion dollars and a State tax loss of more than 160 billion dollars. This is what has driven the Federal deficit over the years and has severly pinched State budgets.

4.     Hygiene/Health:  The individual must have a place to live, bathe, and eat. The individual must be healthy to be unencumbered to create value.  We should make healthcare more affordable by changing the present business model where our bodies are held hostage and prices are set a la carte. Presently there is no transparency to allow head to head competition between providers.  We need legislation that requires all healthcare providers to publish their prices for services on a single website along with their history of outcomes versus prognosis.  We need ombudsmen trained in medical practice to assist individuals in making healthcare decisions based upon diagnosis and competitive costs and outcomes.  Cost containment due to head to head competition through transparency is the only way we will avoid rationing.  The recently passed health insurance reform legislation, although 52 times the length of our Constitution, deals only with the 15% of health care costs associated with insurance overhead.  This bill was fixated on the issue of coverage and neglected to deal with the 85% of health care costs associated with the providers and the present health care business model.  Because it does not change the current health care business model, this legislation is designed to replace one two tier health care system (for those with insurance and for those without insurance) with another two tier health care system that requires rationing for most of us and unlimited health care for the wealthy. Dementia is the single largest cost driver for Medicaid which is the single largest driver of health care cost increases. Yet we never hear any legislator, governor, or president call for increased or better managed research to reduce the prevalence of geriatric dementia. We could spend 300 billion dollars on dementia research and if successful it would be the bargain of the century. Individuals can also be encumbered by the responsibility of care giving to children, parents, and significant others.  These individuals should be provided with sustaining resources during the time that they are caregivers. 

5.     Security:  The lack of security and the fear it creates and the precautions it mandates can trump all other priorities and prevent the possibility of economic value creation.  The United States has a population of about 310 million but only has about 700,000 non-federal peace officers.  With these officers on four crews covering three shifts, with vacations and time off, at any given time there is only one first response officer on duty for every 2000 citizens.  We have a very thin line of security that cannot be in all places and cannot protect everyone.  The Supreme Court has already ruled that the primary duties of peace officers are to maintain order and enforce laws. They are under no obligation to protect individual life. Therefore the individual has been put in the position of having to assume responsibility for most of his or her own security.  Consequently we now have more than seven million instant response citizens who have a sense of duty to help reduce violent crime by carrying a licensed concealed handgun.  As a result about one in about every 40 adults is now licensed to carry a concealed handgun and all gun free zones that prevent concealed carry are becoming more asymmetrically dangerous.   Therefore, we need a nationwide concealed carry reciprocity law.  And it is way past time to decriminalize the addiction to drugs, provide mandated withdrawal treatment from hard drugs, legalize and tax marijuana, and eliminate the financial drivers for corruption, violence, and turf wars that have caused the business killings of hundreds of thousand people on both sides of our southern border.  Unlike ending the prohibition of alcohol, we do not need a Constitutional amendment to accomplish this.