Ha! You're Poor!

The Great Gatsby highlights the disparity between the upper and the lower classes of society. The disparity between classes is extremely visible in the United States.

Poverty, the classic marker of the lower class is a constant, self-propagating cycle. We start the poverty cycle with a family in poverty. This family in poverty cannot afford to properly educate their children. These children continue their lives with sub-par education, which leads them to make sub-par decisions. They are more likely to choose not to pursue higher education, which then leads them to struggle to find jobs. Their inability to find jobs means they struggle to earn enough money to get out of the poverty threshold. They then start a family, which just continues the cycle of poverty over and over and over again.

There is a couple of welfare programs that the government can instill to help alleviate the problem of poverty. Obviously, the easiest way to get people out of poverty is to simply provide them with money. There is a pitfall to that: usually people living under the poverty line make bad decisions with their money. Providing poor people with money can lead them to make even more bad decisions, for example purchasing drugs or alcohol.

The better way to combat the issue of poverty is to make education more accessible. Teaching impoverished people what the right decisions are and providing them with the knowledge to excel in life is the one way to guarantee that people can be brought out of this.

(P.S. It is usually impoverished people who constitute the majority of the prison population. Did you know that prisons are also a type of business? These prisons get money based on the number of people imprisoned, which creates incentive to imprison people, how stupid is that?)