Why I Wrote This:
I understand it's not people's fault that they are poor; even if it actually is.... lazy uneducated scum bags. Maybe if you took that loan the bank offered and used fertilizer & pesticides to develop your tiny paddy field you'd have increased your yield and not been stuck on subsistence farming like your family has for the last fifty generations.
Maybe if you had thought through why you were moving to the 'big city' as opposed to believing that in the big city everyone was so rich that even your idiot lazy cousin has his own car....next time check to see if he's a rickshaw driving Cabbie loon!
Poor people make countries (like Pakistan) look bad (particularly in numerical terms); do you see col awesome documentaries on rich people in developing countries, nope news outlets find the most crappy section of the almost perfect nation and then dig for stories and shoot their coverage from there.
Did you know that estimated 40% of Pakistani's live below the poverty line...nope, and that's like 80 million folks....what about the remaining 60%, the majority that do manage to get make ends meet....what are we? Chopped liver and hence un-newsworthy?
So the primary question for most governments is...What do we do with all of the poor people?
Since their proposal suck (as always....tax breaks for poor people doesn't make sense if they don't pay taxes in the first place geniuses), I have a few ideas.
1. Redefine Poor...Statistically: Make them less poor, re-evaluate the 'poverty line'; yes can debate on how fair or unfair it is, but it's an easy fix solution and governments do it all the time. It is a considerable achievement to reduce the number of poor people without creating any jobs or general economic growth for that matter.
2. Fake Tax Returns: Lets just generate about 20-30 million fake tax returns and the write off the amounts due as 'unrecoverable'....due to wide ranging protest over the United States intervention in Afghanistan or something believable like that....Western countries love peaceful disobedience protests.
3. Organ donations: I'm sure their poor peoples body parts are worth just money as money as rich peoples. The market for kidneys, blood etc are all worth $Billions, these impoverished folk can also be use for medical testing projects. They can use the revenue to educate themselves or just throw an amazing rave and hire DJ Tiesto to perform. The number of 'tourists' alone would be terrific for the 'kidnap rich white people' business.
4. Export Adoption: We'll make it unbelievable easy for people to come to Pakistan to adopt kids...however, there are some ..ahem...fees involved. Can we get some baby loving NGO's here? Doing this properly with a concerted publicity drive and eventually Madonna or Angelina will adopt a few of the little rascals and then the flood gates will open. If they don't we can simply claim that white folk are racist against Pakistanis....
'What are our impoverished kids not cute enough?'....no we can't plastic surgery at a young age is a terrible thing...we'll just sell their non-essential organs. Till we can exploit them in some other way...Camel Jockeys. Perfect.
5. Poor People Are Thin: They are skinny enough to be models....so lets make them into models; just throw on a little makeup, teach them some basic English words and maybe a little plastic surgery to cover up the cracks and everyone will applaud the future rags to riches story....the government will obviously keep a cut of all future earnings...to recoup their investment....and pay for some gold plated Jumbo Jets. We're Fly, 50 Cent ain't go nothing on us..
6. Government Jobs: The good old government can afford to hire more people (they always seem to after an election). They can make these newly inducted poor folk do things like staff the govt. agencies and specialize in tasks like having a dedicated chap to operate the fans via a cycle (prudently save electricity).
Create a human protective circle around each government officers important expensive car and run with them as they are driven, the savings from accidents and distinct lack of insurance premium, would pay for itself. Train these destitutes to operate blackberries and various brands of cell phones and have them man these devices for their illiterate bosses. All personal assistants are to get personal assistants. In another words, the government will hire anything with a pulse and find them any innate task to do...like smile maybe. Professional Greeters.
The increase in an officials entourage would greatly add efficiency to that senior public servant, particularly once he discovers that the internet isn't just for porn.
In case the government doesn't want to hire them, just hire people on the books and process payment to their favored swiss bank account....trust me, I'm a banker, it'll work.
7. Pieces of Land: Give it to them, Pakistani's love the idea of being land owners, no matter how useless the land is. So I say the sitting government maximize the political benefits and do it Zimbawe style; they got rid of the rich white folk and gave their land to poor black wannabe farmers..(Note: That didn't work out so well for them, the country almost starved to death).
So in Pakistani terms, we tell the poor masses that the land belonging to a rival faction is being 'gifted' to the people. First come first served. Real Poor people own nothing, they'll get to their desired location in minutes family in tow, ready to start tilling.
They'll squat on that territory so fast, the rooster won't realize that all the hens were last nights dinner. The rival faction will be pissed, but those unlucky buggers will be outnumbered. Political Genius
8. Reallocate Them: Sell them and Send them abroad: Send them where ever someone can find them work...by the boat full mind you. They work really cheap, particularly once sold as indentured labor; Screw the UN Charters, and they'll send back foreign exchange through remittances....besides Slavery wasn't a fad, it's a classic and it's going to make a comeback...I'm telling you! Particularly with the number of poor folk, it's economical. The revenues and savings alone can help build us our own Space Shuttles (80 million is a lot of people).
In the long run this can be part of the nations foreign expansion plan....have our poor peoples over populate other countries and then take over through democratic means....I love democracy. Why not export it humanely?
9. Proper Ad Campaigns: Make them advertise themselves better, get some funny entertaining signs while begging for alms, their revenues will shoot up and voila they won't be poor anymore.
FYI: It's a misnomer to consider professional beggars to be poor by any stretch of the imagine, I've done the math and they make more money by begging than most people with decent jobs...AND THE LITTLE SHITS MAKE IT TAX FREE!!!
10. Pretend they don't exist: What Poor People? Plausible deniability (mostly) works for Mossad, CIA, MI6 etc. I project a 100% chance of Success.
The Big Idea:
Developing Nations have more than their own share of poor people, and one can make the argument that it's a part of the teething process, but to be fair, that's hardly going to make a poor person feel better about his predicament.
We could just make them less poor, but that would require economic growth or something like that. Investments hard to come by, human capital is cheap, after all, we keep spouting out the little suckers. So why bother, lets just gloss over it as we tend to. A defeatist attitude hasn't hurt us yet...oh wait. oops.
We can be rich in life as we strive and are lucky enough to be, but end of the day, we all die poor. Just something to think about the next time we see someone less fortunate than ourselves lying in the street begging for help.
