RFlagg said:

Perhaps if your beloved so called "job creators" paid people a living wage rather than horde more and more of their profits for themselves there wouldn't be a war on poverty. They can't even pay their employees a rate that keeps up with inflation. Worker compensation goes up 5.7% since 1978, while CEO pay 726.7%. You right wing folks cry foul if the government taxes the rich about "spreading the wealth" but don't care that the rich are stealing the money earned by the hard work of the working class and keeping it at the top. Want to stop spending so much of your tax dollars helping the poor? How about your heroes paying everyone a living wage? How about they start hiring people again rather than fire people so they can have a jet? When the job creators start doing that then we can complain about how much tax money goes to helping the siftless who refuse to work and "want a handout". When some rich guy, <cough>Romney</cough> making $20 Million a year off investments actually spends $15 to $19 Million of that making businesses that just run off those investments rather than just holding it for their own greed, then we talk about a war on poverty... if I made that kind of money I wouldn't need even $1 Million a year, I'd stop around $150k (+/- cost of living adjustments from this area to whatever area I was in) and the rest I'd put into making stores or something, paying people living wages... $20 million a year would pay a lot of people a living wage.

And to be clear, I believe in the right to start your own business, and to be compensated for the risk, but when over half of your workers need food stamps, and you are making $18.7 Million a year, most of that in very low tax capital gains, then I start having issues. Nobody needs that kind of money, nobody. I'm not saying that everyone should cut off at the $150k (+/- cost of living for a given area) that I'd stop at, but after $250-$500 or so it starts to get bad if they aren't paying everyone under them a living wage (and if they are all being paid a living wage, then start hiring more people rather than keeping minimum staffing).

But no, they hold it for themselves, they fire thousands of people and keep the rest an minimum wages for over 3 years so they can have and keep their jet, their incomes greatly increase year to year compared to the rate of inflation while the few people they keep aren't keeping pace, and you people on the right complain about the poor rather than looking at the people responsible. You complain about how the poor are all just lazy... stop your job, work with the poor, take a job in retail working minimum wage for 10 to 20 years of your life. Most of those people want better jobs, they don't want a hand out, they want something better for themselves and their kids. Most of the poor want out, not by a handout, they want good jobs, but the "job creators" care only about increasing their pockets rather than helping their employees. Every person I know who gets government assistance (and that is a very large percentage of the people I know) would love to make a living wage and be off government assistance, a great many of them are embarrassed to be on the government roles and take it only because the only other choice would be take their kids and live on the streets, while the business owner or CEO hired by the company they work for jets around from mansion to mansion.

RFlagg said:

The problem is poverty as he noted. The problem then is that the Republicans don't care about the working poor, and see them as leaches and want to cut the programs that help them survive without having to resort to crime.

We also need to know if both countries consider violent crime the same. That is, while they use the same word, does the UK have a broader definition of violent crime? And as Grinter pointed out, how is the crime spread out over there? If it isn't just in the largely poor areas of large metropolitan areas than there is another issue at play than poverty and that may need exploration. He also didn't show if the UK was going up or down for the same 20 year period.

I agree however that we need to look at how violent crime and murder rates have come down, and need to explore how those were achieved.