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> The solution is for government programs to tax me and people like me to provide simple things that can help break the cycle of poverty.

It'd be even better to end institutionalized racism, institute a mass pardon program, and pay reparations to the victims of Nixon's stupid escalation of the war on plants:

  At the time [1994], I was writing a book 
  about the politics of drug prohibition. I 
  started to ask Ehrlichman a series of 
  earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently 
  waved away. “You want to know what this was 
  really all about?” he asked with the 
  bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace 
  and a stretch in federal prison, had little 
  left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, 
  and the Nixon White House after that, had two 
  enemies: the antiwar left and black people. 
  You understand what I’m saying? We knew we 
  couldn’t make it illegal to be either against 
  the war or black, but by getting the public 
  to associate the hippies with marijuana and 
  blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing 
  both heavily, we could disrupt those 
  communities. We could arrest their leaders, 
  raid their homes, break up their meetings, 
  and vilify them night after night on the 
  evening news. Did we know we were lying about 
  the drugs? Of course we did.”

- Legalize It All: How to win the war on drugs, http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20160323102916/http://harpe...

edit: John Taylor Gatto [1] points out in one of his books that black families were pretty stable post-civil-war, until the governments started sending black men to prison for teh ganja. Children do better when they have a father around.

[1] https://www.JohnTaylorGatto.com/

I miss-wrote. It sounded like I thought there was ONE solution required. Clearly you have a point and there is far more to the story and there isn't any reason I can think of why you wouldn't be able to do both of these and more.

It's a red queen's race. On the one hand you can give free lunches to kids who don't have enough to eat. You put together a volunteer after-school study group to help the kids get their grades up. Meanwhile, the rich kid has private tutors coaching him on SAT prep for several years, he belongs to multiple extracurricular clubs, maybe he gets a summer internship at a Cravath System style law firm or a job as a page in Washington, maybe he wins a medal at the International Math Olympiad...

We're not going to solve inequality by nudging people up from the bottom. We've gotta tackle the elephant in the room: capital pays more and capital is easier to move around than labour. That's all there is to it.

> If he gets caught underage by cops with a six pack of beers or a jar of mixed hard-alchohol stolen from a liquor cabinet, or good forbid enough marijuana for a joint, he's not going to be able to rely on his parents' to hire the lawyer to get those charges removed.

I'm curious if you've ever lived in these areas and had friends that fit the description of your comment.

I think you'll find that inner city kids get just as many breaks as suburban white kids. You'd have a point if it was the black ghetto kid in the suburbs being caught at a party - but within the city environment absolutely no way. The kids who got in trouble for that stuff growing up were on their 14th chance.

I lived in such a neighborhood and had local friends growing up. It took a lot to get arrested for something as simple as a joint. You were generally well known as a troublemaker by then, and rightfully so.

The typical response to those issues was dumping out the liquor/drugs and telling the kid to go home unless he was a known problem, in which case yeah - the cops used broken window policing to get them off the streets.

Inner city kids have as many chances as suburban white kids ? What city is this?