Andy Haines, the Professor of department of Primary Care and Population Sciences, in
University College Medical, says that poverty is the number one killer in the world today,
outranking smoking as the leading cause of death (Parmley, 1). Therefore, poverty is a
serious problem and should not be taken lightly. In America, poverty is also one of the
serious social problems and American citizens and policymakers have been tried to
overcome it for a long time. Ron Smith’s “Preventing Poverty” first appeared in the Policy
& Practice in August, 2013. In this article, Smith aims to convince his readers that the
holistic change in existing policies to prevent the poverty. Smith focus on arguing that
although it cannot eliminate the fundamental matter of poverty right away, offering early
education to the children in poverty can make them to obtain gainful employment and earn
a living wage in the future. Also, he emphasizes his audiences, who are mostly the policy
makers and people who have voting rights that they not only need to support more on early
education but also should not stop funding current policies and modifying them more in
future oriented way. He believes that supporting the poor with fundamental needs, and at
the same time, helping them to stand up by themselves in the future by changing some
policies are the solutions for preventing poverty. Smith uses several rhetorical strategies,
mostly Logos by listing the research results and some Ethos, and causes and effect analysis
to create a strong and convincing argument in order to appeal to his target audience. By
proposing realistic suggestions of preventing poverty and using many credible research
data, Smith wrote very effective arguments to convince his readers.
First of all, the article begins with introducing the symptoms of poverty and the continuous
growing of the poverty rate to show the seriousness of poverty and grasp people’s
attention. Smith claims that the programs of Government were designed to relieve the
symptoms of poverty such as “drug abuse, violence, lack of employment opportunities,
poorly performing educational institutions, homelessness, and hunger”. However, although
many policies and programs have been operated, those symptoms not only still exist but
become more severe. Also, according to the research of Smith, “during the 2007 to 2001,
42.7 million people or 14.3 percent of the U.S. population had incomes below the poverty
level”, but in 2011, more than 100 million people lived with low-income government
assistance, which means the rate of the poor is keep increasing. Therefore, to avoid this
