I've discussed this before but about capitalism and poverty
world bank sez said:
According to the most recent estimates, in 2012, 12.7 percent of the world’s population lived at or below $1.90 a day. That’s down from 37 percent in 1990 and 44 percent in 1981.
This means that, in 2012, 896 million people lived on less than $1.90 a day, compared with 1.95 billion in 1990, and 1.99 billion in 1981.
Progress has been slower at higher poverty lines. Over 2.1 billion people in the developing world lived on less than US $ 3.10 a day in 2012, compared with 2.9 billion in 1990- so even though the share of the population living under that threshold nearly halved, from 66 percent in 1990 to 35 percent in 2012, far too many people are living with far too little.
Moreover, while poverty rates have declined in all regions, progress has been uneven:
East Asia saw the most dramatic reduction in extreme poverty, from 80 percent in 1981 to 7.2 percent in 2012. In South Asia, the share of the population living in extreme poverty is now the lowest since 1981, dropping from 58 percent in 1981 to 18.7 percent in 2012. Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa stood at42.6 percent in 2012.
China alone accounted for most of the decline in extreme poverty over the past three decades. Between 1981 and 2011, 753 million people moved above the $1.90-a-day threshold. During the same time, the developing world as a whole saw a reduction in poverty of 1.1 billion.
In 2012, just over 77.8 percent of the extremely poor lived in South Asia (309 million) and Sub-Saharan Africa (388.7 million). In addition, 147 million lived in East Asia and Pacific.
Fewer than 44 million of the extremely poor lived in Latin America and the Caribbean, and Eastern Europe and Central Asia combined.
heres the link where I got those FACTS...
http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/overview don't be distracted by the class warfare screed, in wealthy nations. it's mainly about marshaling public sentiment for political power. Rich people have less votes so they are easy to target to curry favor with everybody else to gain political power. I don't think many here can even imagine true poverty.
Regarding the islamic terrorists just needing a hot meal and a job ISIL and other extreme factions are just artifacts of the Shia-Sunni conflict that has been going on since that religion split into two factions (centuries ago?) that don't think the other half (or us) deserves to live. They are also busy destroying christian artifacts in the region. They desperately need to mature and reform like most other major religions already have. We can't fix that for them, and while strong dictatorships may be able to hold them in check using force, that is far from a permanent solution .
The recent policy shift by Obama seems to be changing horses during the race (or trying to ride both). We have aligned with Saudi Arabia (sunni) and against Iran (shia) in recent history. Releasing $100B of sanction to Iran should buy some good will, while the over $1B paid coincident with the recent hostage release, just demonstrates that taking hostages pays off.
Of course it's far more complicated than that but without some adult supervision the opposing powers may end up nuking each other. Not sure I trust Putin to be the only adult in the room but he has his own problems with extreme factions at home so doesn't (shouldn't) encourage such behavior.
No easy answer but the most extreme of the extreme pretty much need to be killed, but not by us. There are enough resources in moderate regimes in the regions to clean this up themselves, but it isn't easy while they have to balance appeasing factions in their home countries.
While the Saudis are trying to squeeze out marginal US oil producers by pumping full out and keeping prices low, they need the oil revenue from more expensive oil to afford to mollify their populations at home that they pay to sit around and do nothing. Not surprising that some of these well fed "idle hands" turn to terrorism. :
So much for poverty causing terrorism (several of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi). OBL came from a wealthy family.
Good luck to us all... we need it. Beware too simple answers for complex problems. To bring this back on topic, Trump is the master of too simple answers for complex issues. So many are ill-informed and eat that stuff up, but that is what all politics comes down to, all the world's complex problems boiled down to much too simple solutions. "Trust me if elected I'll fix everything". It seems we hear that same promise every election cycle.
JR
PS: Some of the recent stock market volatility may be caused by major oil producing nations selling off holdings from their sovereign wealth funds, to raise cash to keep the lights on during the current much reduced oil revenue.
