#176 The Definition of Poverty

The Christian Economist | Dave Arnott

The Biden administration is considering changing the definition of poverty to be a relative term related to the lower end of the income spectrum. That would guarantee that "The poor will always be with you." This is perhaps the most important statistic in Christian economics: In my lifetime, the share of the world’s poor has dropped from 44% to about 8%. That’s just astounding. In the book titled Progress by Johan Norberg, he writes it this way, “The great story of our era is that we are witnessing the greatest improvement in global living standards ever to take place. Poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy, child labor, and infant mortality are falling faster than at any other time in human history.” Things are TOO Good As a matter of fact, things are SO good, the Biden administration is considering redefining poverty. A recent article in the WSJ is titled Will Biden Cross a Line on Poverty? The subtitle is “The Administration may attempt to expand the welfare state via a definitional trick.” You see, to keep people dependent on the government, they have to continue to pay them. As the poor get richer, they are less dependent on the government. A Christian economist thinks that’s good. The statists who now run the executive branch of the government see it as a threat. Quoting from the article, “The new poverty line would be significantly higher. It would also break with more than 50 years of precedent by establishing a relative standard. People could become better off and still be classified as “poor”; poverty would decline only if income at the bottom of the distribution increases more quickly than in the middle class.” Well, the only time that has happened in recent history was during the Trump administration, when the economy was SO good, that the income of the poor increased faster than for the rich. That’s really quite a trick, by the way, and that’s why the Black unemployment rate hit a record low during the Trump administration. But the totalitarians can’t have that, because they lose power over the poor. The poor will always be with you. My podcast #9 was titled The Poor Will NOT Always Be with You, and was chock full of data points, showing how the poor are getting richer. There is a very good book by Jerry Bowyer titled The Maker Versus the Takers. He explains that Jesus spoke those words, “The poor will always be with you,” because He knew that we lived in a fallen world, where we couldn’t adapt to God’s economic plan perfectly and that’s why we would always have the poor with us. Here’s how he writes it, “IF Israel obeys, there will be no poor. But because God knows they will not obey, He Predicts the poor will always be with them.” We care about the poor, not the DISTANCE between the rich and the poor. That’s why almost all complaints about income inequality are violations of the tenth commandment against covetousness, as I pointed out in my podcast #17 titled Don’t Covet. And, that’s why this relative measure of poverty the Biden administration is suggesting is so un-Biblical. They’re actually proposing that the poor will ALWAYS be with us, because of the way they’re defining poverty! You can watch these power-hungry bureaucrats for a long time and not find a more perfect example of non-Biblical economics. If you look up the GDP per capita that is adjusted for Purchase Power Parity, you find that the Global average income is: $18,000. So, if the Democrats are global socialists, they will actively redistribute every dollar above $18,000 from Americans to the poor around the world making less than $18,000. The average in the US is just under $70,000. That’s a lot of redistributing! Let me repeat for clarity: That’s what a GLOBAL socialist would do. But they’re not global socialists, they are national socialists, because they want to redistribute wealth only within the border of the United States. There was a national socialist’s movement in Europe ninety years...