How can poverty be eliminated from the face of the earth?

[Inder]

Poverty is everywhere in the world, whether its the USA or the USSR. Poverty is earth's common enemy that generates many social evils including crime, depression, addiction and low self esteem, just to name a few. How can it be eliminated from the face of earth?

[tnr_lady]

It can't be. If you walked down the street and gave every passerby $1500, many would just spend it right away or gamble it rather than managing it and trying to make it grow. What you want would require educating everyone away from self-centeredness, and that's not going to happen.

[Drew]

Eliminate the upper class. Wealth is a scale. The poorer someone gets, the richer someone else gets. It's yin and yang. You can't have that extreme upper class without having poverty. If you want to eliminate the bottom half, you have to also take out the top half and put everyone on a level playing field. This is a concept known as communism. It works hypothetically, but put a corrupt dictator in there and you have the disaster that was the Soviet Union.

[poeticman]

when money has no value there will be no poverty when people learn to grow there own food build there own homes and teach there own children this poverty will decline but there are laws that say a poor man can build his own home grow his own food and teach his own children becouse that would cost him no money and make no one else any money withought money we could feed an army at no cost just a lil hard work and a few man hours building growing ect

[smallhorn771]

In my answer here, I will only address the cost of this project, and how it can be financed:
"It now takes less than a week for global currency markets to exceed the entire annual volume of world trade in goods and services, distorting their real value and resulting in trade that is neither free nor fair."(1)
In 1972, James Tobin, who would eventually win the Nobel Prize for economics in 1981, suggested a tax on international currency transactions.(2)
This would help correct the imbalances that result in trade that is niether free nor fair, and even a small fraction of 1% tax on currency speculation would be adequate to elimate world poverty by means of direct aid.
Surprisingly, Jacque Chirac opened the World Economic Forum with a similar suggestion in 2005 - since the total cost of eliminating
world poverty is only in the 100s of billions of US$, even a 0.1% tax on speculative trades will raise enough cash to completely eliminate world poverty within a year.
(the data is in a state of rapid flux, but the numbers are always increasing, there's the rub!)
- at least 3 factors would be accomplished:
(1) direct aid - cash or the nearest equivalent to the needy
(2) counseling - to ensure sustainability once the intial obstacles of need are overcome
(3) a correction of the gross imbalance in currency values that are the result of pure speculation by those who are wealthy enough to bank large amounts of cash, and move it quickly.

Of course this idea will be opposed by those who do have the cash and the ability to move it quickly, thus destroying the possibility for the vast majority of creatures on this planet to enjoy a decent life.

from:
http://electromagnet.us/dogspot/modules....le&sid=255
"Needless to say, this does not appeal to large banking interests on Wall Street. It is also seen as a threat in London, which controls a third of the world's currency trade. Yet it has strong supporters, including a former president of the World Bank"

The Tobin tax...
one of the most intriguing potential ways to stabilize UN financing without damaging sovereignty or distorting market flaws."

Barber Conable,
President and Executive Director,
The World Bank, 1986-1991
During the last rivival of Tobin's idea, Rupert Cornwell wrote for the UK Independent

Mr Tobin isn't the first liberal economist to have worried over the risks posed by speculative flows to growth and and the financial stability on which that growth depended. "When the capital development of a country becomes a byproduct of the activities of a casino," Keynes wrote 65 years ago, "the job is likely to be ill done." But even the author of The General Theory is hard pushed to match the current celebrity of James Tobin.

The proposal would require unprecented international cooperation: implementation seems daunting. But the challenges are clearly defined and neatly summarized by the Hallfax Initiative(3) on their website..(see URL below)."