a major problem solved by 7 AM.

The way we define poor people is that they don't have much money.  There is some official government body that does this, although I think other organizations have their benchmarks.  You hear it all the time and it always seems to have the same format so much money for a family of four.  It always seems to be a family of four.  Sure enough if you type 'family of four' into google up pops the suggested poverty guidelines.  Actually you get hits with other family numbers but not so many as with four, so one suggestion that hits me right off the bat is to urge families of three not to have any more while those with four should get to it and make one more.

Here it is, The Office of The Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation: http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/15poverty.cfm  Apparently The Chief Secretary for Planning and Evaluation has bigger fish to fry, and god only knows what The President for Planning and Evaluation is up to.

And there are poverty thresholds and poverty guidelines, and apparently Alaska and Hawaii have their own thresholds and guidelines.  I would examine this document more thoroughly but it looks pretty boring.  $24, 250 for the proverbial family of four, and $11,770 for a family of one, which doesn't sound like much of a family, but maybe he has a couple of cats, or maybe a bird or a fish. 

So there it is, instead of fooling around with our reproductive equipment, at great cost, mind you, why don't we just hand every family of four making $24,250 a buck, every lonely guy making $11,770, a buck, every family of four making $24, 249 two bucks, and so on.  Doesn't seem like it would cost that much.  Further google research reveals that there are 45 million poor in the US, so if we round that to 50 million and let's make it 10,000 per person because many of those poor are in the same households, and I believe that takes us to 500 billion.  Is that a lot of money?  Still googling around I see that the US expects to take in two trillion this year which is a quarter of the government's yearly take, and 640 billion of that goes to the military.

So there you go, make love not war.  Like I noted earlier we haven't had a military victory since Grenada, and we certainly don't feel safer since, well when did we feel safe?  Anyway obviously this problem of national defense is not one that we can solve by throwing money at, since that is what we have been doing for hundreds of years and we haven't become safer.

And you know the bible is always exhorting us to be nice to the poor, so there we go, and even if North Korea and ISIS and Iran, and those guys with the funny name who are kicking up that fuss in Yemen, take advantage of our having no army and slaughter us all in our beds, we are all going straight to heaven for aiding the poor.

So there you are.  I had been meaning to get into the question of punishment and revenge, but  having solved the problem of the poor by 7 AM, I believe I shall spend the rest of the day in indolence.