There will always be poor, sure, but to think not helping them has no cost is utterly idiotic. What about child poverty, maybe the cycle can be broken. Saying you can't do anything about it is stupid and lazy, there are greatly varying levels of poverty around the world. Can you explain to me why that is or is it too complicated for your right wing sound byte mind to grasp?
The sky has fallen!
Larue is actually right! "Poverty within society will never go away" and he put his finger right on the underlying reason — before he drifted back to the comfort of his ideological straitjacket. "There ha[ve] been poor people since 10 minutes after the first coin was struck." Plain and simple: Poverty is definitional. If someone has more, they're Rich; less, they're Poor. And no guaranteed income/welfare/unemployment insurance/minimum wage/child benefit/…/… can ever change that.
However millions of years ago when we climbed down and started walking, we left the truly selfish apes back in the trees and agreed we'd be better off evolving and sticking together. And every society since has figured out some way to share, if for no other reason than mobs of beggars are inconvenient. And even dead of starvation, there's enough meat on a human to stink up the place. Besides, even the most bereft live human has more potential use than any sick or dying one. So somewhere long before we invented writing, we invented charity and welfare. And we learned long ago — because
Larue hasn't been the only one to be right over the millennia — that those good things aren't a cure, because indeed, nothing 'cures' poverty.
What this pilot project was intended to do was provide solid evidence whether having money — the same as if they had paying jobs — would enable the poor
to better fend for themselves without welfare, and cut the costly burdens they now place on that whole range of expensive, piecemeal social services, that come with all their costly workers and cross-purposes.
Dougie's promise to consider the evidence, was the only hopeful thing in his pretend platform, but stock-conservative ideology froze his feet. What if the evidence said more poor people did better this way and it saved the province money as well? Can't have that!! Cancel the investigation!!! Don't trouble us with facts! Promise broken.
Dougie ignored
Larue's inescapable truth, (this time in Jesus' words) that, "The poor, shall ye
always have with you". More to the point he ignored the corollary: Then ye shall
always have to do something with, for or about them.
And it'll cost. Always. TANSTAAFL!!!
