Exact point I was trying to make about the DC area... Yeah, where as some of the new kids in class think that $8.15 an hour for a mom with 3 kids isn't poverty it disagree... When one does the math, $8.15 in the DC area with it's high cost of even slum housing is very much a poverty wage...

If we are to look at ways of helping folks escape the cycle of poverty we are going to have to have programs that "subsidize" or we are going to have to enact laws requiring employers to pay "livable wages"... One way or the other... Or maybe a combination of the two... There are small mon 'n pop businesses that just don't have that corporate America profit margain that cannot afford to pay a "livable wage"... I'm one of them... Yeah, even though I pay my two employeees well over the minimum wage if I had to pay them a wage that I *thought* was a livable wage, meaning they could afford a house, a car, health insurance, college fund then with what I make in terms of profit I would be in a loss situation... But corporate America isn't in this siutation and they can pay.... And they can be requird to hire folks right here in America rather than outsorce jobs...

So I'd be willing to look at some kind of subsidy/corpoarte-regulation system where programs are restroed that are intended to help folks that want a better life have the opportunities to have one... This would be some movement toward "social justice" and give people some hope... The worst thing I saw during my years in social work is what hopelessness and despair do to people's motivational level... It kills it...

A good read about what happens to folks when they get beaten down is a book by historian Kwenneth Stampp entitled "The Pecular Institution" where he taslks about the sytemic and institutional thinks that were done to "manage" slaves and these things weren't purdy and given what most folks think about the hiostory of our country were downright Draconian...

Some of those same things are being done to our poor today...

America does have a "soul" that is much more righteous than it is showing today...

Like I said, we've beaten our poor into submission... They have given up... There is no pursuit of happiness... There is no equal opportunity.... There is about what the black among us got from the Emancipation Procalmation: Ya' got nuthin', We ain't given you nuthin'... But yer free... Free to do what???

Bobert