Someone wrote a Letter to the Editor that somehow got printed! This is a letter I could have written.

The editorial “Giving people a fair chance” (Opinion, Jan. 18) implies the problem lies with America’s top 1 percent. Fifty years ago, our wise government officials declared a War on Poverty and vowed to stamp it out by taxing the “haves” and handing it over to the “have nots.” In 1964, 15 percent of our population was assessed to be living in poverty. In 2014, after the government has handed out trillions of dollars to the “have nots,” we still have a 15 percent poverty rate.

Just think what we could have done with the trillions of dollars we wasted on subsidizing poverty.

Since the total population has doubled in this 50-year period, the number of people living in poverty has also doubled. Perhaps these “Robin Hood” tactics aren’t working very well. Instead of continuing to vilify the rich, why not work harder to keep kids in school and obtain a good education or at least a meaningful trade skill? Why not work harder to prevent 13- to 19-year-old unwed and unemployed teens from having babies? Why not work harder to maintain two-parent families? Why not work harder to raise children in a church setting?

No, that takes work. It’s easier to sit back and blame the rich.

We reward poor people for having children they cannot afford. And that’s the root cause of poverty in the United States: poor people having children they cannot afford. I could solve 90% of the poverty in this country in two generations. If you go on welfare, you get sterilized. You’ve proven you cannot take care of yourselves, so you have to play by my rules. Someone has to be the adult.