Poverty is a Crime

When you decide to buy a house, like most people you take a loan out from a bank. As a result, the bank actually owns the house until it is paid off. But, while the bank/mortgage company owns the house, you’re paying the property taxes and insurance to protect the property that the bank owns yet the bank pays nothing, plus the bank is earning interests on the loan you’ve taken out to buy the house in the first place. It’s a win-win for the bank. The banks and mortgage companies can also sell your house and make money on it while paying no taxes and getting interests on your house that they actually own and can foreclose on you. Taxes should be pro-rated. They, the banks and mortgage companies, pay most of the taxes at first but then as the loan gets paid down, you pay more of the taxes until you own the house at which time you pay one hundred percent of the taxes and you have no more interest to pay. Most home loans are for fifteen or thirty years. Just think about the taxes you pay on something someone else owns, and can even sell it out from under you. Money begets more money when the tax laws favor the rich. This is just one way the rich and government keeps workers at the subsistence level. Henry George considered poverty as a profound injury on the people, the individual and the collective, as a crime. If poverty is a crime to the workers, why do they still vote for people who support poverty. These people, who are the very rich and can buy our state and federal governments, they believe in the iron law of wages, the knife edge called subsistence—workers being as poor as possible without losing the ability to work—is an essential national asset to be scrupulously enforced. Henry George wrote about criminalizing poverty in 1879. It was true then, and true today. Until the workers understand all of this, they will keep voting the wrong way and for the wrong people. Workers need to ask questions, read, listen carefully, but give a grain of salt to the hyperbolic screeches from personality types on the radio and television. But when voting, keep your family and future in mind. Remember, the very rich already have theirs and will do what they can to keep you from getting yours, so support unions, fight for a living wage of $15 to $22 an hour, free education, a new G.I. Bill to help new home buyers. Then find a candidate who also supports these causes and whatever other changes you want to see happen. Then hold their feet to the promise. Learn the truth about the universal basic income. In November 2016, after a fire devastated the community of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, in Sevier County. Within forty-eight hours singer and actress Dolly Parton used her Dollywood Foundation to help those impacted by the fire. For six months nine hundred families received $1,000 a month and at the end of the six months, they were given $5,000. Parton, a native of Sevier County, understands abject poverty and she wanted to provide a hand up to all the families that have lost everything in the fire. Nine million dollars were paid out to help these survivors. And it helped bring the community back from the ashes. In a study by the University of Tennessee, it was revealed that those who received the financial assistance via Dolly Basic Income; 11 percent of the people said the emotional support and knowing someone cared was most beneficial; 27 percent said the donated clothes and belongings were most helpful, but 62 percent said the cash they received was most helpful in recovering from the fire. Dolly Parton understands how helpful a basic income is not only to the individual but to the economic wellbeing of the community, and was willing to put her own money to prove it.