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Title

Poverty

Description

<bq author="Martin Luther King" source="Progress.org" href="http://www.progress.org/dividend/cdking.html" caption="Final Words of Advice"><b>The curse of poverty has no justification in our age.</b> It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty. [...] The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity.<fn> If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking. <i>(emphasis added)</i></bq> <hr> <ft>Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. This was forty years ago. Though some things have changed for the better, the framing of the issue of poverty has changed for the worse; imagine a politician or eminent public figure making the statement above today. You really can't---and that's a shame. There's still more than enough wealth around to support the idea; we'd just have to make do with a few less jet fighters, aircraft carriers and wars. That's a tradeoff that America is unlikely to make, either now or under a foreseeable future presidency.</ft>