That's because the richer people are living off of government aid, including the taxes being paid by the hardest workers.

Trust me, the 'working poor' don't have as much in resources and disposable income as the people who aren't working at all. I've lived it.

Let me add an addendum and example here:

During the 2008 election, Obama made an infomercial that talked about the horrible conditions of want among the less fortunate Americans. One of his examples showed a woman with an exquisite nail job complaining that all she could afford was soda for her family to drink at every meal, so she couldn't afford to buy milk.

For starters, I looked into what it costs to have and maintain fake nails, and for that cost alone, I could keep my family in milk easily.

But all that aside... If she served water at every meal, she would have enough money for enough fresh milk for each family member to have one tall glass a day. The family would have the added benefit of avoiding the nutritional detriments of soda, which tends to counter all the positive effects of the main nutrients in milk. If she bought powdered milk instead, it would be cheaper than the soda. I agree the powdered milk is an acquired taste, but if it's combined with reconstituted canned evaporated milk, it's really pretty decent and still costs as much or less than the equivalent amount of soda.

The answer to this is not forbidding people from having children. The answer is discouraging a culture in which "my baby's daddy" is more common than "my husband".

The Fragile Families study came up with some interesting data from which interesting conclusions can be made. For instance, roughly 70% of families with children could be lifted above the poverty level merely by having the mother marry the father, who is employed 80-something or higher percent of the time and is abusive less than one percent of the time.

Even so, 'starving children' is almost non-existent in the U.S., to the point where they've had to coin a new phrase to claim that there's a hunger problem. Now it's called "food insecurity", which means that you had good meals today and will have good meals tomorrow, but you're not too sure where it'll come from beyond that.

The other problem is poor nutrition, but that has nothing to do with the inability to afford good food. Families on food stamps tend to overspend on processed foods. I personally feed my family abundantly and healthily on only slightly over half the food stamp allotment in my state, and I do it by buying only food-stamp-allowed foods. (No, I am not on food stamps. I pay for other people to be on food stamps, so I don't have enough money left to eat like I was on them.)

The trick, and I have been considering making a pamphlet or writing a book on this, is to watch your dollars per meal and per pound. Brown rice, white rice, beans, and lentils are far higher in meal per pound and far lower in dollar per pound than a bag of frozen Tater Tots. They're also nutritionally rich and not expensive to cook. (I can make most of my recipes with a pot or pan, a heat source, and a source of water, which even homeless families can acquire.)

The answer to poverty is not birth restriction.

What matters to me is not how many children someone has, but how much we're paying for them.

I am less opposed to a father and mother supporting and raising six children than I am to an unwed mother on welfare dumping one child on the system for you and I to support.

I am impressed. You are entirely correct.

My husband, with an IQ of at least 135 (it gets higher each time he takes the test), was sent to a psychiatric hospital in the '80's and put on Ritalin in the '90's. When he moved in with his father and stepmother, the first thing they did was to get rid of the Ritalin and establish structure in his day and give him plenty of exercise. Vast improvement.

Fast-forward a few years. We had our son evaluated for ADHD by an actual doctor who is actually trained in it, and his diagnosis was that the boy was borderline and could become ADHD soon. He said that my son might need medication in another year or two. Well, it's been over a year, and he's actually improved noticeably.

What did we do?

I homeschool him. Every one or two subjects, I set a timer for ten minutes and tell him to run around outside. Sometimes I lay down the law and make him do 'grunt work' that he doesn't feel like doing. Other times, I'll accelerate his learning to keep him interested. I keep him on enough of a schedule that he knows each day what is expected of him. I remove as much artificial flavorings and sweeteners from his diet as feasible, to the point where I make almost everything he eats, down to the dessert. Butter, milk, cane sugar, fresh or frozen fruit/veggies, whole-grain bread, brown rice instead of white... You get the idea, I'm sure.

To those above who get defensive about it, I acknowledge freely that some kids have real ADHD and they really need the medication. However, this article is about kids who are misdiagnosed, and I believe that the education system and modern culture is mostly to blame for that.

In my part of America (a corner of New England and that's all I'll say), the glasses are part of the price and you give them back afterwards, to be processed, sterilized, and repackaged for the next day.

"Wikileaks is doing great work for the world."

And if a few.. hundred.. Afghanis who prefer peace to tyranny get brutally murdered thanks to Wikileaks, hey, collateral damage, right?

You did hear about that part, didn't you? The released documentation contains hundreds of names of people who are informing on the Taliban to the U.S. military. Their names, their father's names, and the locations of their villages. These are people who object to girls being splashed with acid for the terrible crime of attending school. Spokesmen for the Taliban say that their leaders are already sifting through the material, looking for people to punish.

The American military is a tough group and can survive this. The United States is a tough country and can weather this. It's those innocent people, the "little brown people" that Europeans tend to forget even exist, who will pay the heaviest price.

In fact, let's look at just one of these conditions, because this truly fails the logic test for me. I'm serious, it does.

In what society, for instance, and under what conditions, does the society force a man to rape a woman and then punish him for his deed with the death penalty? You only need to name one, but it does have to fit both conditions.

If you want to do murder instead, go ahead. In what society is a person forced by the society to kill someone and then punished by the death penalty in that society for his or her deed? Please name one for me so that I can study it further and see how your claim holds up under scrutiny.

Murders, rapes, and treason still occur in Cuba, where each person is given a home, a job, and enough subsistence to live upon by the government. Murders, rapes, and treason occur in the U.S. They occurred in the Soviet Union. They occurred in Imperial Russia. They occurred in Europe during the eras of monarchy and feudalism. They occur in India, with its caste system. They occur in remote parts of tribal Africa, where there is little or no overreaching authority.

So if these crimes are the fault of the society, why has every single society so far failed at eliminating them? How would you propose punishing society for forcing these poor people to kill and rape others?

Actually, some preliminary studies suggest that early puberty in girls may be triggered by the presence of a 'stranger male' in the household. In other words, Mom's boyfriend.

And yet poverty is still at the same population percentage, broken families are at an all-time high (over 70% among blacks in the U.S.), the most prominent epidemic is spread mostly by unsafe sexual contact, and I think that people living in places like Darfur might take issue with your claim that everything is hunky-dory.

Education levels in the U.S. have also declined. I invite you to locate a third-grade mathematics book written in the 1700's and take a third-grader through any of its lessons. The U.S. literacy rate is, if calculated through a common methodology using tests on Prose, Document, and Quantitative skills, actually around 60%. (Higher estimates are based on a very low requirement for literacy, and people who pass those tests may be unable to read well enough to even follow simple instructions.)

Sure, there are improvements. In the U.S., for instance, we no longer enslave people on the basis of the color of their skin. (It does still happen in other parts of the world, though.) We've also made advances in technology and medicine. However, your absolute statement that society is better "in every respect", though, is very easily disproven.

Er, not all of my examples involved adapting with changes over time. My great-grandmother didn't touch or deal with a computer until she was in her 90's. What makes you think that the Founding Fathers would have to have transistors explained to them? Do you think the average computer user knows what one is? Silicon? Already in use in the 1700's. Electricity? One of the Founding Fathers was Ben Franklin, remember what else he was famous for? :) How could they possibly understand the notion of binary? Maybe by likening it to a semaphore? That was the earliest form of telegraphy, the Internet being the latest.

Current society? What do you think would be a foreign concept to them? The majority of differences between the U.S. now and in its founding are societal constructs that we hold in common with Ancient Rome.

"...the constitution, a document that has worked into its fabric the ability to amend itself, is considered to be untouchable and unchanging." Then AMEND IT. It's one thing to say, "The second amendment is outdated and we need to change it." It's quite another to say, "The second amendment can be reinterpreted to mean this and that, so that we can change the laws of our country without having to get two-thirds of Congress on board."

My great-grandmother understood what a laptop was the first time she saw one and she was born in 1900. Do you think the Founding Fathers were stupider than her?

I must admit I'm a bit tired of the old argument that people in the 1700's were somehow incapable of understanding today's technology. Do you think they had smaller brains than we do?

My father didn't even have a calculator growing up. He learned to use a slide rule. When the Internet first began to develop, he was one of the first people on it. He quickly learned how a computer works. My grandfather used to repair radios with vacuum tubes. Now he finds old favorite songs on Youtube. It didn't take him long to figure out how to do it.

"The more and more we progress, the more abstract our concepts become..." The part of that which intrigues me is the word "progress". How many children do you think were born out of wedlock in 1770? What was the literacy rate? (I can answer this one right off... in the northern colonies it was universal, because nearly every child was taught to read well enough to understand the Bible.) Did you know that leeches for medical use started making a comeback in the 1980's? Did you know that maggots can clean the dead flesh from a wound and promote healing so effectively and efficiently that only antibiotics halted their use in U.S. hospitals? Did you know that with the discovery of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, hospitals are starting to use maggots again?

Sure, we have made progress in some areas. In others, we have remained the same. In still others, we have regressed. If we want to talk about 'abstract concepts'... have you ever read documents from that era? Have you ever read the Federalist Papers? Of course the Constitution wasn't 'abstract'. You don't want the highest law of the land to be 'abstract'. Have you read Paine's works? Jefferson's? Do you honestly think that they lack the capability to understand abstract concepts? In that area, I believe that we of the Soundbite Era have regressed.

May be worth pointing out at this juncture that people used to marry only two or three years after sexual maturity hit, which means that abstinence wasn't expected to carry you through the rest of highschool and your entire college education until you started "making enough money to marry". A girl, for instance, used to know how to manage a household at 14 and marry at 16, while a guy would start an apprenticeship at age 6 and be a (self-sufficient) journeyman by age 16-17.

Now they think that the fix to this problem is to let teenagers go off having sex with multiple people they will never expect to marry, and just have an abortion if the contraception fails. The problem is that hormonal contraception changes a person's hormonal balance, and that's not a good thing to do to a girl whose body is still developing. Abortion also causes health issues that even miscarriage does not. The going theory is that, since hormone levels rarely rise to the same level for a nonviable pregnancy as for a healthy one, the hormonal fallout of suddenly terminating a viable pregnancy is what's causing the increased risk.

Of course, this doesn't even address the problem of STD's.

If we really want to steer our children towards the most biologically favorable sex lives according to multiple scientific and medical studies, we should reconsider both the society that encourages abstinence during the person's most promising years AND the society that discourages them from entering into stable, monogamous relationships before they start engaging in intercourse.

I might. My calculated caloric intake to avoid steadily gaining weight is 1200-1500 calories a day. And yes, I am an adult, and I might be on the shorter side, but I'm not a midget.