Beautiful work.

The problem with talking about “the poor” is that they are viewed as an undifferentiated mass. They are not.

There are the poor who didn’t used to be. Mostly, they won’t be poor for that long, but occasionally circumstances are so severe that it will take awhile, if ever.

There are the poor who come from a background of poverty, but are doing things that will help them get out of it. They, also, won’t be poor for long, again barring unforeseen circumstances.

There are the poor who are on the wrong end of a multigenerational pattern of poverty. The children in this group deserve our compassion. The adults in this group deserve to feel whatever shame is involved in recognizing their own contributions to the situation, and their own PERSONAL responsibility to do something about it, even if only for their children’s sake.

If you finish high school, don’t make babies till you’re married, stay married, stay out of jail, and don’t get addicted, you will not stay poor for long in the USA, unless you simply refuse to try. For sure, your *children* won’t be poor, if they stay with the pattern of decent behavior you’ve established.

Multigenerational poverty *in the USA* is mostly a values problem, transmitted from generation to generation. Nothing will fix it except attention to those values just listed in the previous paragraph. When someone is bleeding internally, you start an IV, maybe transfuse, but you do what you must to stop the bleeding. Virtually all government based solutions are largely of the bandaid/transfusion variety because they do not address values.

We need to be willing to “provide transfusions” as long as it takes for the people who really have no way of taking care of themselves, the mentally ill and disabled, etc. And helping people who have fallen on hard times, temporarily, is only being a decent neighbor.

But when poverty activists fail to differentiate the causes of poverty for different populations claiming services, fail to acknowledge the need for personal responsibility in alleviating poverty, and advocate programs that co-dependently help poor people stay poor, the rest of us are justified in looking askance.

As always, the children suffer. The solution is not to hand money to the poeple who put them in the situation, and who keep them there, and who train those same children to do it again to the next generation.

Much of your article seemed to be saying that conservative-types want to heap shame upon those whom they purport to help – and when that is applicable, your point is well made.

Now if only you can get the liberals to stop using “shame” as a tactic to raise even higher taxes for the ineffective welfare systems that the Federal Government has no business running.