*squeals with joy* Some nice person gave me some suggestions for some new rants. I love it! I accept your challenge! I'm gonna start off with poverty because it's something I personally know a fair bit about since I live in it! ugh. Yes, poverty sucks. Yes, there is a staggeringly large percentage of the globe that live in it. Yes, it's inhuman and cruel and it shouldn't be this way. Yes, there is no easy solution to this problem and it is currently getting worse. The rich are steadily getting richer and the poor even poorer. It's stupid and it's senseless and it should stop. Enough for me stating the obvious.

The poverty problem is a lot more widespread than a lot of the financially endowed people would think. When rich people think of poor people they think of third world countries where people barely have clothing and water.They might have the mental image of the old bum living in a box in some back alley far away from their posh mansions. They have no idea of the camoflaged poor that are everywhere, all around them. Even in their own backyard there are working poor, people who work full time jobs but make so little money they can't afford a place to live. I've seen it, people who could only get hired at a minimum wage job and can't afford the rent of a one-bedroom apartment so they have to live in their car. That's just wrong on so many levels. I work in a supervisory position in the food service industry, I make barely above minimum wage, and if I didn't have a roommate sharing rent with me I would never be able to afford this small one-bedroom apartment in the not-so-nice part of the city. What is wrong with this picture??? It takes two people working full time to raise enough money to have a roof over our heads and food on our plates? Thinking back to the 1940's/50's the image of the old family when father came home from a hard day at work to find mother in the kitchen cooking supper in her pretty dress and high heels, the daughter in her poodle skirt and the son in his sweater-vest doing homework... very 'Leave it to Beaver'. It's a classic image but what's gone wrong since those days? It takes two people to make ends meet today whereas then it took only one? Oh, and if this dual income household has a child they then have to shell out even more money to pay for daycare because both parents are too busy working to look after their baby. Day care is expensive, you almost need three people bringing in full-time wages to be able to afford that. The working poor should be an oxymoron but there are far too many, people living paycheck to paycheck, never seeming to get ahead and not because of poor budgeting. That's me right there: a full time job in management, living in a modest apartment, no car payments sapping my bank account, and I live in poverty. That's enough to make me puke. Some of my friends are even worse off that they need financial help from social assistance because they don't make enough at their full time jobs don't cover rent, medical bills, and day care. Gone are the days of the ideal '50s single income family.

Why is this? Capitalism, commercialism, inflation, politics, the government, giant corporate conglomerates, the blame does not lie on just one culprit. I wish I had a solution for this, I really do. Increasing the minimum wage would only cause businesses to increase their prices for goods and services to cover wage costs. I see it all too often, after the government finally agrees to increase minimum wage the prices of food, electricity, clothing and everything else goes up as well, and this ends up nullifying the pay increase. Sad, very sad. The prices of the food at my work is going up the second time this year... and it's only March. It's friggin ridiculous. There needs to be some way out there for those people who have like billions of dollars to have some of it taken away and given to people who need it more. Make those uber rich people donate a percentage of their yearly income to charities for the homeless and poverished, like the Salvation Army or something. Seriously, no one person in the world needs more than a hundred million dollars, I don't care who you are. The number of people who fall into that category of wealth is mindblowing. Ugh. The worst part is there is no easy solution and there never will be one, this problem will just get worse and worse until the Earth gets so polluted we need to migrate to a new planet. Of course the poor won't be able to afford seats on the shuttles...