The war on poverty

No. You’re wrong. This isn’t an excerpt pinched off from the latest elect-candidate’s manifesto. So, stop guessing now.
Poverty plays a big role when it comes to winning elections, making speeches, making commercials or to just appear on T.V. Everybody has been heard from on the subject except the poor people themselves. So I decided to go out and interview a poor person and ask him what he thought about it. It’s very difficult, mind you, to get hold of a poor person these days, because nobody likes to admit poor.
So, I finally found a man in the rundown section of the city who was willing to admit that he was poor and was also willing to talk about it.
I started by asking him if he thought he would like to serve on a committee to see what could be done about poverty.
“Mister, if I had any idea about what should be done regarding poverty, I wouldn’t be poor”he reminded me.
“But there’s a school of thought that poor people are the only ones who know the real problems of the poor, and they should be strongly involved in the program to formulate and implement anti-poverty programs.”

“I wouldn’t participate unless they would pay me “he said.
“Oh I’m sure they would pay you. If they agreed to pay you, what is the first thing you would do?”
“I’d move out of the neighbourhood”
“But if you move out of the neighbourhood, you would lose contact with the poor people and you would no longer be able to speak for them.”
“Exactly. Poor people don’t want to be spoken for. They just want to get the hell out of this neighbourhood. Asking poor people how to win war on poverty is like asking President Musharaff how to win the war on terror.”
“You’ve got a point there. But there is a great deal of pressure to have poor people work out their own destinies in the anti-poverty program.”
“Okay, then let them put everybody who is poor on an anti-poverty committee and pay them all a salary. Once they’re on a salary, you’ll solve every problem a poor person has. And they’ll move the hell out of the neighbourhood.”
“On the surface this sounds like a good solution to the problem, but it would put great financial strain on the government.”
“Yeah, but if you put people on salary, you wouldn’t have to make welfare payments, and the poor people would pay taxes, so it would eventually even out.”
“I agree”, I said, “but if you put all the poor people on the anti-poverty committee and paid them, you would eliminate poverty and there would be no reason to have the committee”
“I’m not sure about that. As soon as people get a salary, they can get all the credit they want fromn the banks and finance companies. The more you borrow, the poorer you become. As long as there are credit companies, there will always be poor people.”
“It makes a lot of sense,” I admitted. “You seem to have thought this out pretty well”
“When you’re poor, you have nothing else to think about.”
“I wonder why the government hasn’t thought of it”
“Because they’re afraid we’d all move the hell out of the neighbourhood.”

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