OPD, I really respect you and your opinion. I agree that poverty is indeed the real problem that needs to be addressed, and I agree that addressing that problem would lower birth rate. (I think, I already said that
poor = high birth rate, wealthy = low birth rate, did not I?) I have to say, though, that in the developed world there are relatively few poor people that do not have an option to get out of poverty and earn their living legally. Please note that I was not referring to any particular ethnic group (as you seem to in your post), but "the Western poor" in general.
Perhaps, I should provide a little bit of a background... I have seen REAL poverty. I saw pensioners in my country begging on the streets because their pension would barely cover their rent, let alone heating (with -20 celcius outside), water or food. I saw families raising their kids on bread and sweet tea, not having money for even simple things like vegetables, let alone luxuries such as meat. I saw a family selling their modest business (three pigs and chickens) to pay for the treatment of their little boy with osteomyelitis - and then struggling to survive with virtually no income and no support from the government. I saw my father's life-time savings go bust overnight once the Soviet Union collapsed, and saw him live for several years in poverty, working full-time but having his salary only paid to him every three or four months - and he was so scared to lose his job, a highly qualified engineer working as a foreman in the new economy, that he put up with it, to put me through the medical school. So, I find it very hard to be sympathetic to the poor in the developed nations; the poor with a car, and a cable, and better home electronic equipment than I have - all of it bought with welfare money (my money, at least partially). Most American (British/fill in the blank developed nation) poor DO have a choice and CAN improve their lives if they put some effort into it. Most of them simply do not want to. And those are the people that myself (and whopper, I assume) were talking about in our posts.
I do not think we are going to address poverty by keeping pumping welfare money into the system. The poor need to get off their asses and start working. This is my solution to the problem. Very enlightened, is not it?
As a GP - or, indeed, as a psychiatrist - I will be very happy to try and help the afflicted poor find their niche in life, but as the old saying goes, "the bulb has to want to change"...
