Perhaps the only bright spot of Rick Santorum’s run for the GOP nomination was his response to a question in one of the debates about poverty.  The subject was poverty, and he mentioned that staying out of poverty in this country was a relatively simple things. Those things, according to a Brookings Institute study are:

• Graduate high school
• Work full time
• Marry before you have children

That’s it!  Do those three things and your chances of being poor fall to just 2%.  If you can’t handle those three things then you have pretty much brought your poverty on yourself, and you have no claim on any portion of my life to right your wrongs. 

I also just found a report from the Heritage Foundation on poverty.  They found that there is one major driver of poverty in America: the breakdown of marriage.  Take a look at these stats:

• Eighty percent of all long-term poverty occurs in single-parent homes
• Over 70 percent of poor families are headed by a single parent
• Children in single-parent families are approximately five times more likely to be poor than their peers from married-parent homes.
• Today, more than 40 percent of U.S. babies are born to single mothers, whereas in the 1960s the rate was less than 10 percent.

The 1960s?  Oh yeah.  That’s when the Democrats brought us  Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the war on poverty.  Now, roughly $15 trillion later, our poverty rate has remained roughly around 14%.  In fact, the poverty rate is higher than it was in the late 1960s!  The way they calculated that figure also changed … but we’ve been through that routine before.  But since the 1960s, we have also seen a shift in government dependency.  Remember the Heritage Dependency Index?

Government dependence has climbed steadily since 1962, when the index stood at 19. By 1980, the index had risen to 100. It stood at 294 in 2010, the last year for which the data are available. D.C.-based Heritage has produced the index for nine years.  The report also found that spending on "dependence programs" accounts for more than 70% of the federal budget.

This month alone the federal government will send out more than 80 million checks to people who are dependent on the government in one way or another.  The majority of the people who will get these checks are not even classified as poor!  According to the New York Times, “The government safety net was created to keep Americans from abject poverty, but the poorest households no longer receive a majority of government benefits. A secondary mission has gradually become primary: maintaining the middle class from childhood through retirement.   The share of benefits flowing to the least affluent households, the bottom fifth, has declined from 54 percent in 1979 to 36 percent in 2007, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis published last year.”

You should know that one of the most admirable traits of black society in this country prior to Lyndon Johnson was their incredible dedication to family.  The Great Society destroyed that.  Yet blacks remain completely loyal to Democrats --- the very party responsible for the destruction of their family values.  Go figure. 

Poverty is, with rare exception, a choice.  To be a moocher is a choice.  Putting it more succinctly … POVERTY IS A MENTAL DISEASE