It is OK to not care for the poorer classes i.e.: emotionally, financially, etc.

It would appear that i get the honor of closing this debate. I'd like to start by saying that this has been very fun, even though i now fully understand that we will never agree fully on this issue, even if we debate to the grave, i will explain why this is at the end of this post. I will start of by admitting that the tragic story of Maria Fernandes was a poor example as she did have enough potential to take more high paying jobs, but no extenuating circumstances outside of her own stubbornness not to work in an office caused her to be forced to work that number of shifts. So a person without the education to take an office job would in fact have to work like Maria to sustain themselves in NJ. And even though poverty wage currently is at 5$/h (as you stated), the arbitrarity of that number becomes obvious when you look at the number which is accord to me a whole lot more important, the "living wage" is currently set at 12.51$ for one adult. which does mean that someone working full time with minimum wage (8.25$) would not earn enough money to sustain themselves, with or without children. In your second point you correctly point out that poorer people often make "poor" (pun certainly not intended) economical decisions, but you forget to point out that this is a symptom of being poor and not that poor people are poor because of making these decisions, but they instead make these decisions because they are poor. "The researchers say their experiments indicate that living in poverty is itself enough to cause people to make decisions that would seem contrary to those looking in from the outside. Because of that, they say, programs to assist the poor should focus on ways of extracting people from their environments and then providing assistance, rather than offering assistance that serves only to allow those living in such conditions to maintain their way of life.(1)" As you can see, this is not their fault either, as any of us would make the same poor decisions in their situation, because a simple change in wealth is enough to shift our entire focus from the long term to the very short term. I'm afraid to say that you appear to have misrepresented the research and tests presented in the article. You then propose a very interesting idea about people not able to sustain children still getting them; "If there needs to be assistance in these types of scenarios then remove the child(ren) and block the responsible parties from any further assistance and simply shift that assistance to the child(ren)." I'm sure many of my fellow left wing friends are getting really angry reading that comment. But i can't find any arguments against it, i am as you might see not very liberal. I think the idea has some merit and should really be explored further in a separate debate. And at this point i must point out that you now have started making arguments like "This additional help, on top of Ms. Fernandes's salary, would be more than enough to support her even in a place as expensive as New Jersey." and "block the responsible parties from any further assistance and simply shift that assistance to the child(ren)". I point this out only to show that you are falling bock to showing some people that don't deserve help or should be able to manage with it. Showing that you are having problems justifying the complete lack of help for the lower classes. So in conclusion: In my opinion it is okay not to care about the "lower classes" emotionally, but i do not agree that it is okay in the society that we have today not to care for them financially, as the poorer people need our help and have the same potential as the rest of us, if we give them the same possibility to peruse their dreams. The reason i think that we will never agree about this subject is because we both come from different ideologies, and because of that we see all articles we read from a different perspective. You (appear) to see this issue from a libertarian(?) ideology. Whereas i base my political opinions on the motto "Make as many people as possible, have as good of a time as possible" that of course commands me to try to help as many people as possible. This can be shown by the example of an anti-immigration advocate and a a pro-immigration advocate reading an article titled "immigrants commit more crimes" anti will think "we shouldn't let them in" and pro will think "we need to rework our integration program" (i am not comparing you to either of these people, just making an example). I hope you have enjoyed this debate as much as me, i'll be sure to add you to my friend list. I think we both did pretty good for our first debate. Cheers /LHati http://phys.org... (1)