The Poverty Cycle

This sounds like one of those "chicken or egg" questions.  Do poor people have more kids, or does having more kids make people poor?  Uncle Ken seems to be saying that it works both ways, which sounds logical.  On the other hand, will giving poor people money necessarily cause them to have less kids?  I don't think that having less kids automatically makes poor people rich, but it couldn't hurt.  It also seems possible that there is third factor that both makes people poor and causes them to have more kids.

I read an article in National Geographic some time ago that said birth control is actually illegal in Brazil because of the influence of their Catholic Church.  They also have some kind of government health care that pays doctors more to deliver babies by C-section than to deliver them the regular way, so many doctors do more C-sections than are probably necessary.  Some women have taken to bribing their doctors to tie off their tubes while they're in there because they don't want any more kids.  When interviewed, some of these women have said that they were inspired to limit their reproduction by watching a locally popular soap opera that depicts rich and glamorous people who don't have many kids.  The author of the article said that it was both good for these women and good for Brazil that they were finally taking steps to reduce their birth rate.  Be that as it may, I think it's a sad commentary on what it takes to motivate some people.  Maybe, instead of giving those tin pot dictators more foreign aid to spend any way they want, we should make a bunch of DVD copies of that Brazilian soap opera and pass them out to the illegal immigrants when we send them back where they came from.

Speaking of spending money, I'm sure that many of my ilk will object to the Freedom Dividend because it would be too expensive, but I think it wouldn't be the worst thing our government spends money on.

Speaking of illegal immigrants, the reason I posted that link about the Wall was because Uncle Ken recently said that no progress had been made on building it.  I admit that it's only a drop in the bucket, but at least it's a start.  After signing off last night, I got to thinking about the environmental concerns about building anything in that fragile desert.  While these concerns are valid, I wonder if anybody has calculated the environmental effects of the hungry hordes currently swarming through that fragile desert and trampling what little vegetation it supports.