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These are not aggressive policy changes that will require massive funding. But even if taxes do go up, isn’t that a small price to pay if we can feel confident that we are subsidizing legitimate programs that offer a hand up to the poor rather than a hand out? A hike in minimum wage is fun to talk about, but, in the end, economically speaking, it isn’t a worthy option. Higher wages mean higher costs, which mean higher prices across the board. With a $10 minimum wage, the 99¢ value menu at Wendy’s becomes the $1.99 value menu, and so on, so what’s the point? If $7 an hour isn’t supporting your current lifestyle, then you have other options: (a) team up with a friend or family member to help cover living expenses, (b) change your lifestyle, or (c) use that job as the stepping stone it is meant to be in your quest for better opportunities.

With all of this said, it is important that I acknowledge that poverty will be around forever. I don’t say this as a downer, but rather as a simple reality. While I have more sympathy for the poor now than when I started, I also understand that poverty is going to be around for reasons beyond a person’s unlucky childhood. Even after countless lessons learned, some people will always find it easier to remain apathetic and make bad decisions, to lie down rather than getting up to fight.

To a certain extent, I am able to forgive youngsters who have grown up in substandard conditions and subsequently made poor decisions. The young girl who had children of her own before finishing high school? Maybe that’s all she knew growing up. Nobody was in her ear, daily, deterring her from making poor decisions. Role models? Ha! They were making the same bad decisions. Now, at age twenty-eight, she has two choices: (a) maintain her present status or (b) recognize her mistakes and head on the road to create a better life for herself and her children. We are rewarded for good decisions and dealt a lesson for bad ones. Just as we have to live with the joys of having children, for example, we have to live with the financial setbacks. Wendy from Fast Company got pregnant at nineteen, a decision she wouldn’t change if she could. Now a thirty-one-year-old single mother, she is kicking right along—living in a trailer and keeping a close eye on her daughter’s future. She doesn’t spend her paycheck on beer and cigarettes and other such luxuries. She saves. Her back is against the wall, but her sights are set on tomorrow. “I can promise you my daughter’s going to college,” she told me.

I am unable, however, to excuse the repetition of the same mistakes: the twenty-five-year-old adults smoking and drinking and chasing women or the deadbeats sitting at home, in poverty, watching a movie on their big-screen TV, waiting to scratch off the winning lotto numbers. (I met a guy once on the bus who spent several minutes telling me his method of picking a winning scratch lottery ticket. “There’s a science to it,” he told me. “And I know that science.”) Because that’s all they know? It’s time to grow up. Do you really want to live like that forever? Many have given up, refusing to work hard, and, as I said, I am unable to have sympathy for them.

The ever-present war between liberals and conservatives on the causes, effects, and solutions to poverty will be debated forever. Good. Let ’em fight it out. But what about us, the rest of us, who don’t have a voice in government or who are waiting for our policy proposals to be debated? Is there anything we can do?

Um, yeah, there is.

Imagine if we could reach out to the underprivileged. One out of four, two out of five, one out of ten—whatever. I say that’s more of a success than sitting back and saying, “Well, poverty isn’t goin’ anywhere” or “Um, I’m doing my part: I pay taxes.” Give me a break. You can do better than that. You! You can do something. Forget the government for a moment. You have the opportunity to make a small contribution and become a part of something big. Pick up the phone and volunteer, caution a parent on his