The only reason you and I are not poor is that we were lucky, and a little bit smart. Neither one of us planned for our old age when we were young, we just lived paycheck to paycheck like a lot of other people. We both came into some unexpected money later in life, and we both had the presence of mind to invest it rather than blow it. If everybody could be like us, there would be no poverty in the world.
The first problem is how to make it so everybody gets some kind of nest egg to invest. I read a book a long time ago called "The Biography of a Peasant". I forget the author's name, but I seem to remember that he was the founder of the Hertz Rent-a-Car business. The book wasn't really about peasants, that's just what the guy called himself and everybody else who worked for a living. It wasn't really a biography either, it was this guy's plan for how to hold civilization together when everything goes to hell in the future. One of his proposals was what he called a "universal inheritance". People could not leave their money to anybody but their spouse and, when the spouse died too, the remainder of the estate would go into a fund which would be used to give everybody the same amount of money when they reached the age of majority. I don't remember when the book was written, but the guy had calculated that it would come out to about $20,000 per person at the time. The recipient could use the money any way he wanted, but if he blew it, too bad for him because there would be no other welfare programs except for disabled persons who couldn't work. There would be government jobs for the able bodied unemployed, but they would have to go wherever they were sent to work. If a guy didn't like his government job, he could only quit if he managed to find another job someplace.
Leaving the government job thing alone for now, let's try to identify the problems with the universal inheritance thing. First off all, a lot of people would just blow the money and then have a bunch of kids. I don't remember what, if anything, the author would have done about the kids, but let's move along for now. To keep people from blowing their universal inheritance, you would have to give them classes or counseling about financial matters like they gave us at the paper mill before it closed down. As a former teacher, I'm sure you know that a lot of students don't pay attention in class and, even if they do, there's no guarantee they will utilize their knowledge once they get out in the real world. The lady who did the taxes for a lot of the former paper mill workers told me that many of her clients went through their severance money in a few years. She didn't give me their names, or tell me how many of them there were, but she said that I did pretty well with my money compared to a lot of other people.
Speaking of the paper mill, they gave us a class once about how the subconscious mind works. I'm not sure why they did this, most of the other guys called it "brainwashing", but I paid attention and learned a few interesting things. Your subconscious mind has this image of who you are and, if your situation changes, it causes something called "cognitive dissonance". Your subconscious doesn't like cognitive dissonance, so it tries to reconcile its image of who you were with the image of who you have become. This is why people who win big in the lottery frequently end up broke after awhile. Your subconscious sees you as a poor person, since that's what you were before. One way to reconcile the dissonance is to get you to blow your money and turn yourself back into the poor person your subconscious thinks you are supposed to be. This is why I have said that just giving the poor more money would not help much. You would also have to somehow condition them to not think of themselves as poor people anymore. So, first we brainwash them, and then we give them the money. Now how do we get them to let us brainwash them?
I don't know what to tell you about all that Ferguson and Baltimore stuff. I find it hard to believe that all those cops have declared open season on colored people. They have been dealing with them for a long time. Why would they suddenly declare war on them now? I suppose each case is different, but it seems a lot of people on both sides assume that the Black guy or the White guy is always wrong in every case. Maybe the solution is to hire a bunch of Black cops and only send them into the Black neighborhoods.
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