Meanwhile, Wall Street is reaping record benefits again. Big US companies are sitting on huge loads of cash but won't hire. And Evangelicals overwhelmingly support the party which is only interested in looking after the interests of the super-rich.

This "everyone should fend for themselves" philosophy so dear to so many in the US (especially Libertarians) has been instrumental in creating this situation.

Time for a change of heart.

I am an evangelical. I do not support or favor the rich above any others. I do favor a government that does not interfere and cause these crises in the first place. The government completely caused our current financial troubles by demanding mortgages for every poor idiot who wanted one. It is government that creates poverty, not rich people. Businesses are sitting on their cash and not hiring because they are SCARED to DEATH of what next 9000 new regulations that goof in the White House will issue. Get your facts straight. It is socialists and liberal progressives who destroy JOBS by taking away the money of the successful and giving handouts to an increasingly dependent poor FOR VOTES. We don't need a change of heart. We need a change of administration. I'm even willing to suggest that the system is so broken that the real change we may need is a full-on revolution. Put the poor together with the college graduates that can't find jobs and you have the perfect recipe for violent revolution. It didn't have to be. Good going, you socialists. You have fouled your bed and now you will lie in it.

Wall Street created this mess, not the government. Wall Street created the housing bubble, then asked the government to save it when things went really wrong. Funny how the only country which came out of the financial crisis unscathed was Canada, the country with the most strictly regulated banking industry in the world. Ever wonder why? Or are you too busy blaming liberals and socialists for all the evils in the world?

Tax rates for the rich have been decreasing steadily for the past 30 years to the lowest they've ever been since the 1930s. That's a FACT. In all of the Western world, the USA is one of the countries where the rich pay the lowest taxes. So the government has in fact been taking LESS and less money from the rich in the past 30 years. But where are the jobs? How has it helped anyone except for the super-rich?

The things you wrote tell me that you have been consistently misinformed. I bet that's the case for the majority of Evangelicals. So the next question is: who is responsible for all this misinformation? And what are the Christian leaders doing to identify and expose the sources of misinformation? Or are they part of the problem as well?

Dave C., I am busy blaming socialists and liberals because they are indeed the original and continuing cause of this mess. It began under Clinton to make sure everyone, regardless of income or ability to repay, be granted a mortgage, first through Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae, then the banks were accused of being racist when they wouldn't lend to poor minorities. And so it went. The greedy of Wall Street repackaged those mortgages and resold them without full disclosure of their lack of merit. Those criminals on Wall Street BY FAR are and were flaming liberals. I've made a large part of my own living on the ability to do research -- good and accurate research. You insist that evangelicals are both ignorant and blind, yet neither is the case. We are well aware of what has been done to us and our country, and this is why you now see the huge upswell of extremely organized conservatives poised to take this country back from the entire failed liberal agenda once and for all. Liberals, with their unions, thugs, teachers, vile, militant gays and other special interests have almost completely ruined the job market, educational system and personal liberty in America. Their actions and motives are shameful. They were never about "helping folks out," as they claim; they were all about POWER. This article, at its core, is about power over religion. Conservatives are to blame for not standing up and taking action sooner, but all this will change in roughly one year. Face it, the jig is up, it's over.

When compared to the poor in African nations and other parts of the world, our poor are not poor. They are needy and without some level of welfare would be destitute. But, we are not into our third if not the beginning of a fourth generation of people in poverty. We should help, both government and the church, those who are needy so that no one is destitute. But the current process creates a culture that does not help individuals become self-sufficient. Some kind of reform is needed.

Dear Mark,
I am not going to argue further about policy, because we're both pretty certain of our respective points of view, and I don't think we will be able to convince one another. So let us agree to disagree.
One thing I would like to point out though, is that I didn't use the words "blind" or "ignorant" to refer to you or to Evangelicals in general, but "misinformed". There's a big difference. "Blind" and "ignorant" imply a negative judgment on your capacity to think. "Misinformed" means that you have been given wrong information by sources whose goal is to mislead people. And that is sincerely what I believe: I believe that good, honest people are being consistently given wrong information in order to keep them voting in one direction which happens to be contrary to their own interests.
Here's what a retired republican congressional staffer wrote about the strategy of his own party:
http://www.truth-out.org/goodbye-all-reflections-gop-operative-who-left-cult/1314907779

To Jim: now, you don't need to look at Africa to find starving children:
http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/health/articles/2011/07/28/ranks_of_hungry_children_swell_worrying_doctors/

The idea that the government forced business to make bad mortgage loans is a zombie lie of the right wing media. Even the Wall Street Journal (Nick Timiraos) knows Fannie and Freddie weren't the culprits with only 6.8% of Fannie and Freddie mortgages nonperforming compared to 19.7% of those in banks' portfolios.

More broadly, the idea that government was behind the crisis is debunked by David Min's report. You might not like the source, but read the thing and you'll see.

And let's face it folks, the government did not force mortgage holders to bundle them into mortgage backed securities that could be sold as supposedly sound investments so the folk placing risky mortgages could offload them onto investors and bank the profit before the mortgages went sour. The government didn't force Wall Street investment banks to sell these MBS to their customers while avoiding holding them themselves as too risky. The government didn't force those investment banks to bet against those securities being good so that if what they sold their customers turned out to be junk the bank that sold them would make a tidy profit. The government didn't force Standard and Poors to rate those MBS as being low risk when they were obviously high risk.

Nope. Acquaintance with the facts demonstrates that this was not a 'made in Washington' meltdown, but a 'made on Wall Street' meltdown.

Malnourished children in the US among those so called "poor", are probably the result of the parents not feeding them. While at the same time they're stuffing themselves with all kinds of junk food, beer, liquor, tobacco and yes, DRUGS. I meant DRUGS and lots of them.

Poverty in the US is mostly caused by a behavior, conduct, lifestyle and a lack of work ethic and morals. The high incidence of single-parenthood among women is proof undeniable of that.

Although a lack of a good work ethic is rampant in the general populace as a whole.

It's been said with good reason and I believe has even been the subject of well documented research by the Census Bureau itself among others. That the poor in the US are way better of, than the poor in the rest of the world. Most of them have access to services and consumer goods that only the middle class in most countries in the world have.

Services like Electricity, running water, roads, schools, school buses. Emergency services like fire, police and ambulance service, telephone. Many or most of the so called "poor", in the US, own TV's, radios, refrigerators, microwaves, cell phones etc. Most of them also own cars and their homes. Plus they have access to all the welfare programs that the rest of the world can only dream of.

All of the above, is available only to the middle class or the rich in the rest of the world.

Personally, I feel that the gov't should work towards giving those at or below the poverty level a better job than Mc Donald's. Fast food restaurants are not the place to make a livelihood on; neither is welfare.

I applaud President Obama's latest economic stimulus bill and yesterday's (09/19/2011) tax hike proposals.

Finally, the government should work for everyday Americans and not for those born with a silver spoon in their mouths.

Of course there are people suffering due to the excessive government borrowing and disintegration of the family of the last 20+ years. But, the so called poverty line was a quick invention of some beauracrats that was never evaluated or "peer reviewed". This was before the massive increase in public support, welfare, food stamps, etc. The "poor" now have an income that, to my understanding, is not included in calculating a "poverty line", i.e. some of the poor are better off than ever. I work in a neighborhood that is 90% on SSI and food stamps. Still my family is one of the few that does not have a mega size wide-screen TV.