Today, the Census Bureau will release its annual poverty report. It will almost certainly report that over 40 million Americans “live in poverty.”
But what does it mean to be poor in America? To the average American, the word “poverty” suggests significant material deprivation. But the actual living conditions of those the government defines as poor differ greatly from this perception.
According to the government’s own reports, the typical American defined as poor by the Census Bureau has a car, air conditioning, and cable or satellite TV. Half of the poor have computers, 43 percent have Internet, and 40 percent have a wide-screen plasma or LCD TV.
Far from being overcrowded, poor Americans have more living space in their home than the average non-poor person in Western Europe. Some 42 percent of all poor households actually own their own homes; on average, this is a well-maintained three-bedroom house with one and a half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, only 4 percent of poor children were hungry for even a single day in the prior year because the family could not afford food. By its own report, the average poor person had sufficient funds to meet all essential needs and was able to obtain medical care for his family throughout the year whenever needed.
The left likes to claim that the U.S. has far more poverty than other advanced nations. But those claims are based on comparisons that set a higher standard for escaping poverty in the U.S. than elsewhere.
When a single uniform standard is used, the U.S. is shown to have poverty rates that are very similar to other advanced nations, slightly higher or lower depending on the exact measure used.
I think we definitely want to be careful about the outcry on the secular left about “poverty”. Their solution always seems to be that we need to move in the direction of socialism. And socialism means that the government gets bigger by taking money and liberty away from families, churches and businesses.
As a Christian, my goals are all gospel-centric. My interest in politics is because I want to live in a society that respects my right to work, earn and save, so that I can spend and give in a way that advances the gospel. My job is not to transfer my money to lazy people in their dependence on government. I go to work so that I can have the fuel I need to respect God in my decision-making. The secular government is interested in other goals – like getting elected. I don’t want them using my money for their goals. I have my own goals.
Enraged Joe Biden howls out his hatred for Bible-believing Christians
Here’s an article from the far-left BBC about a recent court ruling.
Children under 16 with gender dysphoria are unlikely to be able to give informed consent to undergo treatment with puberty-blocking drugs, three High Court judges have ruled.
The case was brought against Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, which said it was “disappointed” but immediately suspended such referrals for under-16s.
[…]One of the claimants, Keira Bell, said she was “delighted” by the judgment.
Ms Bell, 23, from Cambridge, had been referred to the Tavistock Centre, which runs the UK’s only gender-identity development service (GIDS), as a teenager and was prescribed puberty blockers aged 16.
She argued the clinic should have challenged her more over her decision to transition to a male as a teenager.
In a ruling, Dame Victoria Sharp, sitting with Lord Justice Lewis and Mrs Justice Lieven, said: “It is highly unlikely that a child aged 13 or under would be competent to give consent to the administration of puberty blockers.
“It is doubtful that a child aged 14 or 15 could understand and weigh the long-term risks and consequences of the administration of puberty blockers.”
[…]At a High Court hearing in October, lawyers representing the claimants said there was “a very high likelihood” children who start taking hormone blockers will later begin taking cross-sex hormones, which they say cause “irreversible changes”.
In this specific case, the far-left social engineers at the NHS prescribed puberty blockers and put her on testosterone. At age 20, they gave her a double masectomy.
For the past 11 months, Robert Hoogland, a father in Surrey, British Columbia, has been forced to watch as his 14 year-old daughter was “destroyed and sterilized” by court-ordered testosterone injections. After losing his legal appeal to stop the process in January… is making a desperate attempt to bring his case into the courts of public opinion, even though it breaks a court order demanding his silence about the case.
“I had a perfectly healthy child a year ago, and that perfectly healthy child has been altered and destroyed for absolutely no good reason,” Rob said in an exclusive interview. “She can never go back to being a girl in the healthy body that she should have had… She won’t be able to have children…”
[…][T]he courts judged his daughter competent to take testosterone without parental consent… [and] he was convicted of “family violence” by the BC Supreme Court for his “expressions of rejection of [his daughter’s] gender identity.” He was also placed under threat of immediate arrest if he was caught referring to his daughter as a girl again.
[…]Rob remains under a strict gag order forbidding him from speaking about his daughter’s case in public and requiring that he “acknowledge and refer to [his daughter] as male” in private.
The Canadian “Democrats” didn’t want anyone to know what they were doing to this father, so they took action to silence him:
[…]Rob granted two video interviews to Canadian YouTube commentators about his case… [T]he commentators who granted them quickly found themselves under threats of litigation. Rob’s first interview was immediately taken down. Rob’s second interviewer… faced similar threats, but initially refused to take her video (not currently available in Canada) down.
[…]Justice Michael Tammen of the British Columbia Supreme Court ordered that Thompson’s interview and various social media posts be taken down. When Thompson stalled, trying to keep a rapidly sharing copy of her interview available to Canadians on Bitchute, the police were sent to her house to demand she take the video down.
Tammen also harshly reprimanded Rob for speaking about his case to the media, warning him that if he broke his silence again, he would likely be cited for contempt of court.
You can check out this story from Mass Resistance, where they have photos and names of all the people who attacked the father’s right to parent his child.
In Canada, all health care is administered by the far-left socialist government. You pay into the system, and you take what they decide to allow you. The schools and courts are also run by the far-left socialist government. And sometimes, they just decide to use the money that you pay them in taxes to come for your child.
Have older women succeeded at teaching younger women about love and marriage?
I once dated a woman who had messed up her education, career and finances by following her heart. She confided in me that she had a hatred of “responsibilities, expectations and obligations”. She wanted to be guided by her feelings, moment by moment. Whenever she failed, she would blame others, or claim that the world was just too unpredictable to make good decisions.
She failed, and was unhappy, wishing that grown ups in her life had told her the truth about her bad decisions. And she’s not alone.
Look at this article posted on the UC Berkeley website:
A recent group of studies has found that women’s happiness levels have been dropping steadily over the last few decades, to the point that women now report lower happiness levels than men, a role reversal from the 1970s. Given social improvements in women’s lives over the intervening decades—increased work opportunities, higher salaries, and more reproductive choice, to name a few—these results have surprised more than a few commentators, with everyone from Barbara Ehrenreich to Rush Limbaugh trying to make sense of them.
That hasn’t been an easy task, even for the economists whose study, “The Paradox of Declining Women’s Happiness,” helped uncover this trend. Those economists, Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson, both at the University of Pennsylvania, analyzed data from several large-scale surveys that have tracked the general well-being of Americans and Europeans from as far back as 1972. They found that women’s happiness levels had dropped over time in each survey. To understand why, Wolfers and Stevenson looked at factors which in past research had been linked to unhappiness in women, such as marital status, income, educational level, and number of children. But none of these could account for the shift.
In addition to “increased work opportunities, higher salaries, and more reproductive choice”, women have also “benefited” from preferences in education, in education funding, in the workplace, and especially in the courts. They get favorable treatment in the criminal courts as well as in the divorce courts. They have been given everything they asked for that they felt would make them happier, and all of it (once obtained) has worked to make them less happy. The biggest part of their unhappiness problem is how their learned selfishness makes them incapable of – and undeserving of – commitment. The declining marriage rate is made worse by disincentives created for men to marry and have children when they are given sex for free, are heavily taxed, regulated by government bullies, and risk being financially raped by divorce.
Far-left and far-right defenders of marriage agree that it’s a “mystery” why women are so unhappy. After all, they say, third wave feminism has brought women nothing but fairness. We have to take it as a given, and solve the problem of women’s declining happiness some other way. Radical feminism can’t be rolled back.
Well, my bossy women advisors are always telling me that I should be positive and tell women how to do better. So I will.
In my own life, I had to escape the effects of growing up in a bad family, in a bad city, in a bad country. Everything I was told was a lie, and would have destroyed me if I had listened to it. In fact, it did destroy my brother. He did listen to it. He listened to our parents. He listened to the worthless public school teachers. He listened to the popular songs. He watched the popular movies. And most of all, he did what his friends told him to do. Don’t you be like him. What you need to do is resist the culture, and focus on doing things in ways that work. You need to make sure that your day-to-day decision-making gets you where you want to be.
The first and most important priority is to get an objective moral standard that can be used to judge the lies that are being told to you. That standard is in the Bible, and it has the great advantage of having been given to you by the same person who designed the universe, and you. Not only can you use it to judge the liars, keeping them and their lies at a distance, but it helps you to stop making mistakes yourself. The most important lesson I learned from the moral law was to embrace chastity, and not to waste my time and money pursuing casual sex relationships with godless women for “fun” or “self-esteem”. Having to play the fool for godless women in order to get sex is degrading for men, and destroys the natural leadership role that men have in moral and spiritual matters. It’s much better to leave bad women alone, and pay attention only to the ones who are interested in being led to achieve things that really matter. I think that raising influential effective Christian children, apologetics on campus, in-house apologetics discussion, and political engagement are really important.
Secondly, the classics. Instead of consuming books, music and visual entertainment made by secular leftists, turn instead to the classics and non-fiction. The best things to consume are evidential apologetics, economics, military history and the classics. Evidential apologetics teaches you to become focused on truth. Free market economics teaches you how the world works. Military history teaches you gratitude and humility. You can undo the nonsense that you learned about men, women and relationships simply by learning the lessons about human nature found in the classics – Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, etc.
Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.
If all your friends on social media are miserable failures in their relationships, lacking chastity, sobriety, charity and unselfishness, then cut them off so that they don’t drag you down with them.
The most common case I see is Christian-raised women abandoning their faith in high school or college because they would rather be liked by non-Christians than defend their faith and accept the unpopularity and exclusion that results. They shack up with atheist men, and give away their best years to them. They have no moral standard that would allow them to reject those men, when those men feel so good to them. And their “friends” support them in that. Don’t keep “friends” who only want to drag you down into the pit with them. Accept that it is normal to make judgments. Accept that it is normal to have enemies. Learn how to disagree with non-Christians in a way that is supported by reason and evidence. Don’t let godless people tell you what you should want. Don’t try to fit in with them.
