Poverty, like most human conditions, finds its root in changing demographics. The two most important factors in flux are: (1) Single-parent families and (2) dropping out of the education process. The situation is worse the blacks than for the Hispanic or white families.

The United States today has the highest rate of single-parent families in the Developed world – 34% as of 1998 and the situation has continued to worsen, By contrast, in 1970 the percentage of single parent families was only 13%.

http://family.jrank.org/pages/1574/S...ic-Trends.html

The situation, already bad, gets much worse when you look at education. By 2006, 72% of black high school dropouts were unemployed. The comparable figures are 34% for whites and 19% for Hispanics.

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/20...N_GRAPHIC.html

The only effective way to deal with this problem is to incentivize marrying before having children and completing a high school at a minimum. Concurrent with this we need to discourage having children when the parent, particularly the mother, is not in a position to care for them without government assistance.

I request that this thread avoid becoming another abortion thread and thereby add a great deal of heat and very little light.