Countries are learning the hard way, that with an aging population, they simply do not have the resources to maintain their social safety nets.
At the same time these social safety nets are being strained by aging, the immigrants entering the country are not filling gaps in our employment mix but instead are competing with the poor for housing, jobs, and social services.
The result is the homeless population is increasing, the wages for low skilled jobs are not keeping up with inflation, and anywhere that large numbers of immigrants are settling down the social services are beginning to collapse.
While people see America as a rich country, it is important to note, the National Debt is over $34 trillion and is increasing by $1 trillion every 100 days. In some respects, America is the "poorest government" on the planet.
At the same time, Americans are seeing their standards of living decline and so are less likely to accept higher tax burden to support humanitarian causes whether within this country or globally. Academics and politicians greedily look at the wealth of a nation's citizens demanding they pay more as their "fair share", but the people are saying "no", you are already spending 40% of the economy or more... make it work.
On the bright side for now poverty remains at around 12% of the population, but absent steps to curb immigration of low skilled workers and if inflation continues to outpace wage growth, we can expect to see that number climb to over 15%. That means more than 10 million more poor people before any incremental immigration adding to those numbers.
My family is culturally diverse. My grandmother came to America from the Carribean, my grandfather came from Germany. My mother came from Germany. My wife came from Indonesia. My daughter-in-law from Africa. And my daughter's partner from Haiti. But being culturally diverse, won't solve our problems, nor particularly add to them.
Instead, we need to focus our resources at enhancing the skills of our workforce through vocational training and education. We need to invest in technology, automation, and the appropriate use of AI to increase our productivity. And we need to explore all sources of energy to bring down the cost of energy from today's levels. Finally, we need to supplement a work force with merit-based immigration.
The subsequent economic growth such policies would produce would allow America to raise the standard of living of its citizens, share more of our surplus with those that need help, and provide more chain migration to unite families already here. But for the near future, it will limit how "generous" we can be since we need to grow the economy to produce more surplus to share and for presently our economy is almost stagnant.
Academics preach that a society run by elites could better allocate the resources of a country to eliminate poverty, but if that were true... there would be no poor in China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, or Iran. It appears a lot simpler in a textbook than in the real world.
Why? Because people work based on what they keep, not what they give away... the more you take, the less they produce. I have watched how a member of my family calculates the value of working compared to what would be earned going on entitlements... the difference equates to around $10K a year... $200 a week... and that makes it hard to go to work.
If our social safety net were limited to the disabled, orphans, and elderly, we could provide a far more robust social safety net, than we do today, but it is not.
We have many people that need assistance because their skills cause them to compete with labor from developing nations. Trying to survive in a country where the cost of living simply is exponentially higher than a third world country with skills that are not more advanced than those of a third world nation leads to poverty.
People who blame colonization for the problems of many countries are simply wrong. A number of comprehensive studies have shown no measurable difference between poor countries that were once colonies and ones that never were. Nor do ex colonies prosper when domestic leaders take control over their economies.
In fact, many ex-colonies like Cuba, Argentina, and Venezuela were once vibrant economies, and it was their internal self-governance that led to their economic collapse due to flawed ideologies that promised better and delivered worse.
It is popular these days to blame colonization for the problems poor nations experience today. It is also popular to blame western culture. But that is largely academic nonsense. Economies work when a nation create the economic environment to produce skilled labor and attract capital. Surprisingly, natural resources are not necessary (Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan being examples).
Lastly, because capital is so necessary to build a modern economy, only countries that have found a way to build generational wealth can experience the level of prosperity of western nations.
And therein is the big problem. All over the world including in western nations, politicians come to power promising to distribute the wealth of a nation to the poor. You can create "a temporary feast" eating the geese laying the golden eggs, but once the "geese" are gone, society starves.
There are plenty of countries that have emerged from poverty to become prosperous nations, but I can't think of any that have done so in less than a generation. And in each case, it took a generation committed to build wealth along with a tax plan designed to attract foreign capital to the nation to achieve that goal. No nation is perfect, and every nation can do better, but any nation that does not reward investment, wealth accumulation, and education will suffer poverty, that is a given with only one exception, that does not apply to most nations on the planet.
There are a handful of nations with such huge reserves of natural resources and very small populations where the people can literally "live off the land". But for the rest of the world, it's time for the youth to crack open the books, to toss out corrupt politicians preaching false ideologies, and create a system that rewards investors to invest in an economy until the people can build their own generational wealth.
