Poverty kills

When asked what kills the most Americans, people come up with answers such as, cancer, heart disease or auto accidents. All good answers I suppose. Few if any would say poverty. First, poverty in America is unlike poverty anywhere else in the world. Most poor in America have a color TV or two and the cable hook up necessary to make it watchable these days. Most poor in America have a car. Many own their own home. Also, there is a wide governmental safety net cast to provide everything from food, clothing and shelter to eyeglasses, job training, drug and alcohol rehabilitation and just flat out welfare checks. Then there are untold private organizations doing the same things albeit less expensively and more efficiently. The classic example of the status of America’s poor today - the Gangsta Mayor of New Orleans made a DVD to be distributed to the poor so they’d know what to do in an emergency. So the thought that poverty could be killing more people than cancer doesn’t compute for most of us.

John Stossel, in his interesting read “Give Me a Break”, posits the idea that whatever else is killing Americans, poverty exacerbates it. If cancer and heart disease are killing Americans, poverty exacerbates those conditions because the poor have no health insurance to get early and adequate treatment. If automobile accidents kill a lot Americans, they kill more poor because the poor are forced to drive older less safe autos. It is hard to argue with this logic. But, what to do about poverty?

We’ve had a 40 plus year experiment with the “Great Society.” It has failed miserably. Look at New Orleans. Who has the hurricane impacted most dramatically? Why the poor of course? But look carefully at the pictures coming out of New Orleans and what do you see? You see poor people being pulled from their HOUSES. You see CARS parked along the curbs of the poor neighborhoods. Those cars might have been used to escape the storm but weren’t. Why? There are probably a 100 or more reasons. One of them no doubt is going to be, “I didn’t leave because I know the government will take care of me when something goes wrong.” Those who harbored such thoughts, based on generations of experience, misjudged. The heretofore generous government handout mentality that worked so well with man-made poverty, failed utterly in the face of Mother Nature. Katrina exposed the local and state governments as the incompetent, corrupt buffoons that make up the majority of LA’s political class.

Then there is the political opportunism from a class of race baiting creeps that use New Orleans’ demographics to claim the President Bush is murdering blacks. It’s impossible not to notice that, by a wide margin, most of the faces that we see on TV in New Orleans are black. But what goes underreported or unreported is that New Orleans has majority black population of between 67-75%; that the Gangsta Mayor, police and fire chiefs are all black; that the government entitlement mentality of those left behind is killing them. What’s obvious but for some reason left unsaid, is that given the figures the biggest majority of those left in the lurch would have to be black. We don’t see poor whites in rural MS and AL on TV. It has not been noted that 75% of those living below the poverty line are white.

Poverty kills. When the inevitable commission on Katrina files its final report on what went wrong in New Orleans and LA, it is unlikely to note the effect that generations of government “help” had on a population that was willing to sit on its front porch or in its attic waiting for a Liberal to save them until the flood waters rose around them, like Mary Jo Kopechne.