Pay Poverty Tax to get rid of Poverty from the World – Blog Action Day 2008

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Poverty: The word itself is very vague in nature. Because poverty is measured in different ways by different people for different reasons. As per Wikipedia,

Poverty is defined as the deprivation of common necessities that determine the quality of life, including food, clothing, shelter and safe drinking water, and may also include the deprivation of opportunities to learn, to obtain better employment to escape poverty, and/or to enjoy the respect of fellow citizens.

But in general speaking, poverty is measured in terms of money and is generally a comparison of two individuals, groups, societies or countries. e.g.

India is a poor country as compared to United States.
South Africa specially Nigeria is the poorest country in the world.
Females are poorer than Males in the world.
In fact, I am poorer than Bill Gates.

And things like that. This is the relative way of measuring poverty.

However defining poverty in absolute terms provides an altogether different perspective. In absolute terms, some facts are:

About 1/2 the human population suffers from poverty.
27% population in East and South Asia lives under <$2-a-day which is defined by World Bank as Moderate Poverty.
Around 1/3rd of deaths which is around 50,000 per day are because of poverty related issues in the world. (Source: Wikipedia)
About 25,000 people which is around one person every 3.5 seconds die because of hunger in the world. (Source: Poverty.com)

This is just the beginning to know about the effects of poverty in the world. What are the other effects you will see in the world because of poverty: (look in the below cloud of keywords)

(Image Created with Wordle.net)

Question: How people become poor?
Well, no one wants to be poor. And no one asks for poverty. People are poor because:

they were born in a poor family, society, country. (Do you have any control on it? I suppose, NO.)
of some natural disaster like Earthquake, Hurricane, Flood, Drought etc.
they lost their business.
they lost someone in their family who was the only earner.
of the unfair policies of governments, organization, banks, lenders etc.
of geographical locations which affects their ability to earn resources like farm, minerals etc. because of presence or absence of natural resources.
of unemployment, population, corruption, education etc.
and many more unavoidable circumstances. The list just goes on and on.

Now what do we do about it. Somethings which we can do easily:

Lets donate our old computers and other hardware to the needy people who don’t have resources to buy one. (Educate them.)
Lets donate our one day salary or a small percentage of it to some organization like CRY every year.
Lets create blog or websites focusing on welfare of poor people.
Lets create means to provide free education to these countries, people and groups who can’t avail that privilege themselves.
Developed countries can provide aid to not so developed or under developed countries to grow.
Free or subsidized health care, medicine, food etc can help lots of poor countries and people.
Have one more tax: POVERTY TAX, for every one in any country earning above certain level and that amount be used in the welfare of poor people, groups and countries.
Lets do something while we can.

I am sure the rich and well to do population can definitely do something whatever they want to get rid of poverty from this world and its definition from Dictionary.

This article is written for a very good cause – Poverty : Blog Action Day 2008.