Poverty is the state in which people do not earn enough money to support life's essentials, such as somewhere to live, food, and clothing. We see the affected every day, especially in southern California, with all of the migrant workers that live in miscellaneous fields, bushes and parks around the area. It affects more than thirty million people in America and nearly five million in California alone, half of which are under the age of eighteen. There have been many proposed solutions to poverty, and none have had all that adverse of an effect, seeing as how the number living in poverty has continued to increase since the 1960's.
             Here are some of the facts; half the world (nearly three billion people) live on less than two dollars a day, The gross domestic product of the poorest 48 nations (a quarter of the world's countries) is less than the wealth of the world's three richest people combined, Nearly a billion people will enter the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names, though less than one per cent of what the world spends every year on weapons would be needed to put every child into school by the year 2000, 51 percent of the world's 100 hundred wealthiest bodies are owned by corporations, The wealthiest nation on Earth has the widest gap between rich and poor of any industrialized nation, The poorer the country, the more likely it is that debt repayments are being extracted directly from people who neither contracted the loans nor received any of the money, 20% of the population in the developed nations, consume 86% of the worlds goods, In 1960, the 20% of the world's people in the !
             richest countries had 30 times the income of the poorest 20% -- in 1997, 74 times as much, A few hundred millionaires now own as much wealth as the world's poorest 2.5 billion people, and the combined wealth of the world's 200 richest people hit $1 trillion in 1999; the combined incomes of the 582 million people living i...