Poverty- the struggle for a solution

Chitra Divakaruni's 1997 essay about the hardships of child labor and about the U.S.'s then recent bill that doesn't allow American businesses to import from factories that have child labor. Knowing that not importing from these factories will get almost one million children laid off, she believes that they would rather work in the harsh conditions that have leisure time. With work comes money and with money the children can buy food, shelter, or clothing; however, if they had no work then their incomes would be lost and food would no longer find its way into their stomach. After analyzing this ideology, the question of whether the rest of the developed world and specifically the U.S. should support child labor by importing from factories that have it.

Opposing this essay is an article by Peter Singer written in 1999 that emphasizes his belief that each adult in the world can, together, completely defeat poverty. He elaborates on this idea by explaining that "[a]n American household with an income of $50,000 a year, spends around $30,000 annually." From that he says that instead of spending the extra $20,00 on  luxuries that it should all be donated to organizations to help poverty stricken children around the world. However, this seems fairly extreme to me and I would like to know what Singer donates to these organizations every year because it seems to me that he is most likely exaggerating on the donations that he believes should be made. What he doesn't account for is that people do more with their money than just spend it. Almost everybody saves their money and many people turn it around into more money with investments as well. To say that people should donate all of their unspent income is absurd; while I don't disagree that donations are an excellent thing, $1,000 per year is plenty of a donation.

I think that one of the reasons why I reacted to Singer's article so strongly is because I am conservative and on top of the essay coming from a liberal viewpoint he also said something similar to, "my liberal friends responded well to my theory.' There is no need for this separation of liberals and conservatives. Why objectify conservatives as greedy snobs who won't donate anything. It is absolutely not true and unnecessary. Because of my conservative views I was offended by Singer's hasty remarks which implied the lack of cooperation from conservative people.