poverty

The actor and director has joined 20,000 other volunteers for "Live Below the Line." The campaign, which runs April 29 to May 3, is intended to raise awareness for the 1.4 billion people around the world who live below the line of extreme poverty.

In every U.S. state, the portion of families where children have two parents, rather than one, has dropped significantly over the past decade.

Americans need to understand these lessons from across the Atlantic. They must know that welfareship is not optimal. The more welfare, the less well-being.

Federal welfare spending has grown by 32 percent over the past four years, swelled by President Obama's stimulus spending and a growing number of Americans whose recession-depleted incomes now qualify them for public assistance.

Being raised in a married family reduces a child's probability of living in poverty by more than 80 percent, according to a recent report by The Heritage Foundation that found the chief cause of child poverty is the absence of married fathers in the home.

Data makes it clear that if you care about the poor, your first priority has to be marriage. If you care about child poverty, your first priority has to be marriage. And if you care about education in low-income schools, your first priority has to be marriage. Caring about poverty without caring about marriage is a waste of effort.

Poverty in America is on track to rise to levels unseen in nearly half a century, demographers say.

Forced "charity" that takes from the successful and merely redirects it to the unsuccessful provides the wrong kind of incentives. Our tax and welfare systems should reward thrift, entrepreneurship and industry, not indolence, timidity and profligacy.

Looking at the big picture, I think that ultimately the problem gets back to two factors: 1) fatherlessness and 2) no fear of God.