Word: poore
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...broader challenge will be to convince voters that giving to the poor doesn't mean robbing the middle class; in fact, easing poverty contributes to the strength of a society. Alexis de Toqueville wrote that the community's interest is really just "self-interest properly understood." Americans must come to realize that is ultimately in their own interest to make society more equitable...
...deal with the suffering: remove them from sight. There are many like Philoctetes in America, citizens cast out from public consciousness because their medical problems seem too painful or costly to face. Among them: 37 million Americans who have no health insurance, a million young women too poor to provide adequate prenatal care for their unborn children, countless drug addicts turned away from treatment centers for lack of room, 73,000 victims of AIDS denied protection from discrimination...
After the Boston fire department rejected them because of poor exam scores in 1975, identical twins Philip and Paul Malone did not think of giving up. Back they went in 1977 with new applications and a new strategy: they declared that they were black. As such, the Malones were hired by the department, which was under pressure to take on more minority firemen. Under a court-ordered affirmative action plan, it no longer mattered that the brothers, with exam scores of 57% and 69%, fell far short of the passing grade of 82% required for whites...
...argument that is used to support this system is that you need to bribe the well-off so that they will support the poor. Translated, what that's saying is everybody better get on the wagon getting subsidies from the Federal Government. But the awkward question that leaves is if everybody is on the wagon, then who pulls it? So I think the single most egregious thing is the idea that in a time of profound fiscal stress in this country, we've got billions and billions of dollars going to well-off people under the guise of universal entitlements...
...where the largest pools of subsidized consumption are. And I believe the idea of spending hundreds of billions of dollars on entitlements in which we're giving money to people who really don't need it, when we could take a much smaller amount and really help the poor and the children, is really an unforgivable way of allocating resources at a time like this...