Consequences Of American Poverty

American Poverty: Bad Fortune or Consequence? In this essay, I will be writing about poverty in the United States. American poverty rates have remained relatively the same for the past few decades. For this reason, among many others, the topic of American poverty has remained a widely-discussed issue. I will be highlighting the definition of poverty in America as well as poverty rates in the local states of Missouri and Kansas, contributing factors, and possible remedies.
The definition of poverty, as defined by the United States Government, is a person or family that lives below the relative poverty line that takes into account criteria such as family size and compilation. A person living below the poverty line has a lower income before tax
Often people who argue for this use emotional pleas and try to build up a victim complex around the poor. They try to argue that the poor are victims of our capitalist society. Often they talk about socialist style welfare programs being essential to ending poverty. They will usually talk about child poverty rates and use them as a shaming tactic, stating that if one disagree with them, they do not care enough about the children. Unfortunately for them, their arguments tend to fall apart under scrutiny. Firstly, they are plain wrong with their suggestion that capitalism is designed to further impoverish the poor and further enrich the rich. Cudd puts it best when defining capitalism by saying, “Capitalism is a system in which there are non-discriminatory, legal protections of decentralized, private ownership of resources, cooperative, social production for all citizens, and free and open, competitive markets for exchange of goods, labor, services, and material and financial capital” (762). Capitalism is designed to put the entirety of one’s successes and failures on one’s own shoulders. The way one becomes rich, is to figure out what the consumer wants, and give that thing to them at a higher quality and lower cost than one’s competitors. Capitalism is also the single best enemy of bigotry. If one owns a business and discriminates against other ethnicities, religions, etc. that person will go out of business because they will be selling to a smaller demographic of people and therefore make less money than competitors. Also, if people find out about said company’s discrimination, many people will reject the business and instead buy from competitors. This will shrink the company’s demographic even further (Cudd