EU-DIGEST

Labels: EU, Poverty

Of the 300 million-plus people living in the United States of America, 37 million live at or below the poverty line! This is according to an annual report on poverty released in 2006 by the U.S. Census Bureau, which studied the nation’s standard of living and included various factors related to the population’s daily living conditions.

he dollars and cents of poverty beyond the shores of North America is sobering beyond words. According to the United Nations-commissioned Millennium Project, “More than one billion people in the world live on less than one dollar a day. In total, 2.7 billion struggle to survive on less than two dollars per day. Poverty in the developing world, however, goes far beyond income poverty. It means having to walk more than one mile every day simply to collect water and firewood; it means suffering diseases that were eradicated from rich countries decades ago. Every year, eleven million children die—most under the age of five—and more than six million from completely preventable causes like malaria, diarrhea and pneumonia.

Jesus Christ said "We have the poor with [us] always” (Mark 14:7) These words that have proven true throughout the history of man: “For you have the poor with you always”, because human beings have failed to recognize there are two opposing ways of life. For 6,000 years, mankind has lived according to the way of self-knowledge, with each man deciding for himself how he and others should live. History and its infamous record of wars, coups, monopolies, corruption, depravity and ineffective governments—stands as a witness to the way of men. Consider a passage from the book of Proverbs, renowned for being a treasure-trove of wisdom: “As the bird by wandering, as the swallow by flying, so the curse causeless shall not come” (Prov. 26:2). In other words, life does not “just happen”—there is a cause for every effect.

Labels: Poverty, World Economy