Funding Visions – Solving the World’s Problems
The Poverty Mitigation Project – An Introduction – February 7, 2025
It is possible to end homelessness, hunger, and poverty in the United States without raising taxes or demonizing any group. We can do this in ways that lower costs for healthcare, education, and housing while guaranteeing all Americans enough income to lift them out of poverty. We can do this in ways that should be acceptable to conservatives (who want less government, lower taxes, balanced budgets and more individual responsibility) and liberals (who want fewer social problems, more equal resource allocations, and more equal opportunities). We can do this in ways that respect traditional American values that give people realistic opportunities instead of constant government handouts.
How is all this possible? It starts with observations and logic.
General Observations: Increases in our standard of living has always depended on technological advancements and trade to lower costs and increase the availability of goods and services. Technological advancements and trade create new industries, new jobs, and raise our standard of living. But they also disrupt existing industries and jobs. This has created great hardships for many people and constant demands for government assistance. Societies seldom anticipated and properly planned for the changes, benefits, and hardships that technological advancements and trade may bring. Many solutions only focused on easily identified issues, such as food for the hungry, housing for the homeless, or healthcare for the poor. Such solutions usually do not address the root cause issues that are causing our problems.
More Specifically: About one third of all Americans do not have the financial the resources to handle common economic disruptions such as job loses, healthcare events, or housing problems. We pay on average almost twice as much for healthcare than our peer counties do but have statistically the worst healthcare outcomes. Our educational systems do not prepare students for the non-academic realities most of them will eventually encounter. Our permitting and construction process for new construction is relatively slow, expensive, and very labor intensive.
Logic: It makes no sense that technological advancements and trade that increase the availability of goods and services should cause great hardships for so many people. It makes no sense that about a third of all Americans cannot handle common economic disruptions. It makes no sense that our educational systems do not prepare students for the non-academic realities of life. It makes no sense that new housing is so expensive and takes so long to build.
Our social problems are very complex and inter-related. Implementing a solution in one area always causes issues (both positive and negative) in other areas. These other issues can easily cause a good solution to be unimplementable. Hence, a more holistic approach to solving our problems is needed.
The Poverty Mitigation Project (PMP), also called the Community Support System (CSS), is designed to facilitate this more holistic approach. It tries to identify solutions to mitigate root issues in the areas of income, healthcare, education, and housing. It then analyzes the impact of implementing these solutions together. It hypothesizes that a set of such solutions can be found that if implemented together will be economically, politically, and socially acceptable.
The following links briefly describe these core problem areas, possible solutions, the theory that the PMP is based on, and projects to help establish whether or not the PMP is credible enough to justify more intensive investigations.
Collectively these policy changes will:
- cost significantly less than what we are now spending on welfare, healthcare, and housing.
- raise all American incomes above the poverty line.
- give all Americans access to quality healthcare with a focus on preventive care and lifestyle choices.
- help students to understand and deal with the non-academic experiences they may encounter in life.
- expand the role local schools play in mitigating local social, economic, and/or political issues.
- give all Americans access to affordable housing by building quality housing at lower costs.
Each of the proposed policy changes have the following characteristics:
- They are well known and have been extensively studied.
- They address root issues that are causing social problems.
- They only effect communities that voluntary adopt them.
- They will have little or no effect on the situations of most Americans.
- They would not be feasible and effectively mitigate our homelessness hunger, and poverty problems if implemented by themselves.
However, when refined and implemented together, the proposed set of policy changes should become feasible and mitigate many of our social problems.
Developing the PMP will require intensive discussions, research, refinements and pilot projects. These activities will generate a long list of reasons why the PMP will not work as intended. However, by using this list, we can engineer a set of policy changes that will be more acceptable. This process needs to be repeated until a generally acceptable set of policy changes is found.
Pursuing this project can be challenging because it requires evaluating the impacts of simultaneously implementing policy changes in many different areas (income, healthcare, education, housing) and from many different points of view (economically, politically, and socially). This can be difficult to coordinate in an academic environment where everyone specializes. There is no department of holistic studies to coordinate such activities.
We are looking for a group that is interested in coordinating efforts to verify whether or not the PMP is credible enough to justify more intensive discussions and investigations. If you know of such a group, please email david@fundingvisions.org
A more detailed but still general description of the PMP plan with some supporting documentation can be found in the last part of the book Redesigning America for the 21st Century: Solving our Healthcare, Income, Education, and Housing Problems
For more information email David@fundingvisions.org
Please note: Funding Visions does not solicit, nor does it accept, donations.