HOW TO ELIMINATE POVERTY

1. Teach the people the importance of sacrifice and delayed-self gratification. The minds of the poor are weak and hence they are prime prey for advertising programs. Their self worth is very low and so they do almost anything to raise their self-worth. Hence you see hundreds of thousands of Jamaicans wasting their money on cell phones when they should be saving for the college education of their children or for their retirement.

2. Teach the people the importance of saving. Instead of buying items to boost self-worth the poor should be saving their money.

3. Teach the people the importance of education. In today's competitive world education is a must to break the poverty cycle. Turn off the cable television and save the money for school fees!

4. The poor must be taught to give. You will never appreciate a thing to the highest level until you learn to give it away. Whatever one gives one keeps. This is philosophical stuff, which I will not get into here but it is a proven spiritual principle!

5. The poor must be taught that having children out of wedlock and or unprepared leads to poverty! Jamaica is obviously overpopulated and while no one wants to talk about it, the actions that lead to this overpopulation is devastating us!

6. The poor must be taught that crime leads to poverty; not that poverty leads to crime! Demonstrations, locking down school property because of dissatisfaction as parents like to do, destroying business property during strikes, confiscating government property by refusing to return salary overpayments as the JTA literally just did, and using strikes as a prime negotiating tool all lead to poverty!

7. Teach the poor that dysfunctional family structures perpetuate the cycle of poverty! The single greatest factor destabilizing us is our runaway libido which has lead to widespread dysfunctional family structures and a population greater than the job potential of our economy but NO one sees this as a problem. Listen foreign investors will never invest in Jamaica the way they have invested in Costa Rica or Ireland because they have persons advising them and these advisors know that the quality of a country's work force is directly related to the quality of the country's family life. So we are trying to put paste on a festering wound and wondering why it will not heal. We will never have lasting prosperity as long as we have widespread dysfunctional families.

8. Overpopulation leads directly to poverty especially when GNP growth does not parallel it.