Poverty in the United States:
What is the best way to help our poor
Peter Singer, a modern day philosopher and the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, wrote an essay addressing his concerns over world hunger and poverty in 1971 titled, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”, in this essay he emphasizes and states, “If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable more importance, we ought, morally do it.”. Singers’ article is addressed to world issues of poverty where as I am going to ask you to consider his thought within the realms of the Unites States borders; and I am going to ask you, do you think that our government, our people, are doing the best it or they can to help our poor? To answer this question, let us first look and ask how and why poverty exists here in the U.S. to begin with? Is it that people are unwilling to work if given the chance? This I doubt. It is not in the fault of the impoverished for being unwilling to work, but in the lack of jobs available for them to be worked. Indeed, in today’s economy, if employment is possible, many find themselves working in jobs for which they are actually over-qualified for, because it is better than having no job at all. Therefore, if there are not enough jobs available to employ those who already qualify, then there are surely not jobs available to those who be considered more of an investment on the behalf of the employer.
Personally, I think that the jobs needed by the American people are already in existence, it is just that they are not made available to those in and of this homeland. The success of Big Business and Capitalism involves these jobs being sourced out to workers in other countries, or to immigrants in this country, all of whom will work for, or for drastically less than our minimum wage, while remaining loyal to their positions and there employer no matter how deplorable their working conditions…