2011年9月27日星期二

:Christian Louboutin Pumps-Define Poverty

Most of us would say that a homeless person with an undiagnosed mental illness, no job, no marketable skills and no bank account is "poor." Does the label still apply if that person wins a $1 million lottery jackpot?
What about a doctor just out of medical school who has $200,000 in debt, no savings, and a residency that pays $40,000 a year for long hours of arduous work? Is this also an example of poverty christian louboutin shoes-pumps?
Is an aspiring novelist "poor" if she has a newly minted liberal arts degree from a prestigious college, $100,000 in debt, a minimum-wage day job and no history of selling any books? How about the novelist's co-worker, who has the same income but has no debt and no higher education?
We are much better at counting poor people than we are at identifying them. This makes no sense, and it explains why decades of anti-poverty programs have made little headway at actually reducing poverty.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 2.6 million more Americans were poor in 2010 than in 2009. That brought the poverty rate to 15.1 percent of Americans, the highest since 1993. Christian Louboutin pumps
Critics of the official poverty index, which is based on comparing food costs to income, point out that it ignores many significant financial dimensions, including non-cash government assistance such as food stamps, as well as non-food expenses such as out-of-pocket medical expenses, transportation and child care. Various alternative measures have been created, but so far none have caught on.
I believe we approach poverty from the wrong direction. Most definitions of poverty focus on an individual's circumstances - how much money the person has, or how much income the person receives, compared to some benchmark Christian Louboutin discount.
I think of poverty as a human condition that does not change as quickly or readily as circumstances. A poor person, in my view, is one who cannot adequately provide for himself, or who cannot conserve and manage what resources are available to him.
No wonder anti-poverty efforts ultimately fail when they merely provide cash or goods. If you hand a poor person a check, you still have a poor person, just one who has some money at the moment. The Chinese understood this when they created the proverb about the difference between giving a man a fish and teaching him to fish.
If we measure poverty according to net worth or according to single-year income, the homeless lottery winner is richer than the young doctor, the aspiring novelist and the minimum-wage worker. In fact, the latter two might already be part of the 15.1 percent of the population that is officially considered poor Christian Louboutin cheap.

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