Winning The Struggle With Poverty by Dannielle Fritz-MacDuff

Today's society has produced an astounding number of people who live by the entitlement standard. Our social services and welfare programs practice the "give a man a fish" method of solving problems rather than the "teach a man to fish" method. As a result the gap between the lower/middle class and the upper class or the "haves and have-nots" is getting exponentially wider as the years go on. Rather than teaching how to get yourself out of a financial rut, our government assistance programs become a trap where the more you try to help yourself, the less help you receive. For the most part, the assistance the people receive is monetary with little or no relevant education.
The problem is not really how much money the people have, but rather a lack of financial education and a lack of desire to make changes or fear of failure.
Poverty is caused by ignorance, and fed by fear and laziness.
We are not taught about money in school, the subject of money is taught at home. Opinions and understanding of money are passed down from generation to generation.
I say that poverty is caused by ignorance because there seems to be this common consensus that money is scarce or hard to get or that the only way to get money is to work hard for it. This point of view is accepted for two reasons; 1) our schools teach us to study hard so that we can get a good job, because with a good job we will be safe and secure and the company will take care of us, 2) we have been lead to believe that when we can not take care of our selves that the government will take care of us ( or more accurately, many of us believe that the government should take care of us). We have the Robin Hood mentality " make the rich pay for it, they can afford it." When people struggle financially, many will place the blame on the economy, business owners, someone, anyone other than themselves. I here people say " if only I had more money." or " I'm looking for a job that pays better." or "my boss is greedy and won't give me anymore money". This is said because the person believes that more money will solve their financial problems, when in reality more money rarely solves the problem because what is really causing the struggle is the person in control of spending the money, because that person is not financially educated. Not because the person is stupid or inferior, but because when it comes to money that person only knows what he/she has been taught by our school system (which is nothing) and at home ( which is to handle money the way that he/she handles money now because that is the only way they know and how it has been done by their family.).
Poverty is created by ignorance, the lack of financial education keeps us repeating the same financial mistakes generation after generation until someone chooses to break the cycle.
Poverty is fed by fear and laziness.
Fear first.
We are taught in school that there is only one right way to do something or one right answer to a question, one right way to solve a problem and if we deviate from that, then we are ridiculed or punished for not following the rules or being different. So we develop this fear that if we do something different and do not accomplish what we set out to do, then we will be a failure and be ridiculed by our peers and other people around us. We are afraid that if we admit that we do not know the answer, other people will think we are stupid because we are taught at school and as employee's that not knowing the answer is a bad thing. In school if we try to collaborate on a test, it is called cheating. In business, collaborating on a test is called synergistic problem solving and the teams get more accomplished than one person could on their own.
After fear is the laziness. It is much easier to not make the effort to learn something new that will help us than to face the fear of rejection or failure. And so the same pattern is repeated over and over again expecting different results , but never getting them because the same behaviour will garnish the same results. I hear things like " I can't do that. or I can't afford it. or I didn't go to the right school for that. or I don't have the time for that, or I don't want to waste the money on learning something new.
We often put our selves in the situation we are in by our choices. Either our choice of action or choice of reaction and rather than taking responsibility for our choices, we blame the economy, our boss, the government, or other persons in our relationships. we choose to discount learning opportunities or other opportunities out of fear or laziness and wonder why we don't seem to get ahead. We use industrial age financial education in the information age where information doubles every eighteen months. We study hard at college learning information in our first two years of school that is out dated by the third an fourth year. College advisers instruct students applying for jobs with information that was accurate 20 years ago but is not necessarily applicable for the student today. We teach our students to regurgitate facts and figures from history, but fail to teach the lessons history has to offer and in doing so create a society that sinks deeper and deeper into ignorance. By our methodology, we teach our students that they must have all of the right answers rather than teaching them to look for multiple, creative solutions to problems. We generally accept complaining about the problem rather than seeking solutions. And then after all of that, we penalize the products of our teaching by creating assistance programs that do not increase intellect but rather force people back into the fear and laziness mode. A person receiving government assistance is penalized by having more and more benefits taken away as that person works harder and harder to make the income that will make it possible for that person to be self reliant rather than relying on the government. These programs create an atmosphere of false security where people say " if I make more money, I will loose my assistance or benefits (I am afraid that if I loose my benefits I will not be able to survive), so it is easier to stay poor and get the hand out, than to create income and not need the benefits (laziness). Our government assistance programs reward lazy and ignorant behaviour by giving young single mothers more money for each child that they produce and added tax credits for poverty level income earners that becomes viewed as a paycheck. I have seen parents with several children come into my office with multiple w-2's totaling less than $12,000.00. These same people tell me that they stop working so that they will receive the maximum Earned Income Tax Credit which produces a larger refund. These people are making less than $12,000 per year before taxes, they don't get to take home 12,000.00 and choose to stop working for a measly 4000.00 addition to their tax refund. I see self employed people who don't take all of their allowed deductions because they want to get the maximum Earned Income Tax Credit, so they pay thousands of dollars more in taxes than they are required to and accept a two thousand dollar refund.
Our schools encourage cheating for students that struggle to learn the way that our schools teach by providing scribes who will write the answers for students who struggle with spelling and readers who read tests to students who struggle with reading so that the grades and standard test scores reach a higher average and the school will not risk loosing funding.

We breed poverty in our society and then tax the poor heavily to pay for the benefits that they receive.
We reward laziness with government benefits, threaten to take away those benefits if the person shows some hint of initiative and fail to educate our students adequately enough to serve them in the real world.

So what do we do about this? We continue to offer the education to those who will accept it, lobby for education reform and teach people to over come their fear of lack of money by showing them the tools available and teaching them how to use those tools. Encourage our children and students to fail on thier own merit in schools and learn from the experience rather than to be pushed through a system that does not prepare them for the real world. Make sure that our children and students are proficient at basic math first, then teach them the advanced math. Teach them to use proper grammer and to communicate effectively. Excellent math and communication skill are essential to our success.