As stated by Franklin D. Roosevelt, “the test of our progression is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” Many people may agree with this statement considering that the United States is such a wealthy country and in 2012, 46.5 million people were living in poverty in the United States and 15% of all Americans and 21.8% of children under age eighteen were in poverty.The honest truth is that many people do not know the conditions this group of people must live in on a daily basis because of the small number of people who realize the struggle there is not a great amount of service. In the article Too stressed for Success, the author Kevin Clarke asks the question “What is the cost of being poor in America?” and follows the question by explaining the great deals of problems the community of poverty goes through daily by saying, “Researchers have long known that because of a broad reduction in retail and other consumer choices experienced by America's poor, it is often simply more expensive to be poor in the United States.
In The Working Poor: Invisible in America, David K. Shipler tells the story of a handful of people he has interviewed and followed through their struggles with poverty over the course of six years. David Shipler is an accomplished writer and consultant on social issues. His knowledge, experience, and extensive field work is authoritative and trustworthy. Shipler describes a vicious cycle of low paying jobs, health issues, abuse, addiction, and other factors that all combine to create a mountain of adversity that is virtually impossible to overcome. The American dream and promise of prosperity through hard work fails to deliver to the 35 million people in America who make up the working poor. Since there is neither one problem nor one solution to poverty, Shipler connects all of the issues together to show how they escalate each other. Poor children are abused, drugs and gangs run rampant in the poor neighborhoods, low wage dead end jobs, immigrants are exploited, high interest loans and credit cards entice people in times of crisis and unhealthy diets and lack of health care cause a multitude of problems. The only way that we can begin to see positive change is through a community approach joining the poverty stricken individuals, community, businesses, and government to band together to make a commitment to improve all areas that need help.
Today it is estimated that more than 35 million Americans which is approximately 14 percent of the population live in poverty. The numbers are high and only continue to get higher. Statistics have shown that poverty is increasing. Millions of people die annually because they lack the resources and food to live a daily life. There exist many programs that offer projects to help or at least to reduce the percentage of poverty, but they lack the financial support. Many people from the middle class are on the borderline of poverty and if the economy does not improve, they will reach poverty. This is very upsetting especially if most of us are middle class. Poverty can happen to anyone, it all depends on society and the economy. According to the definition of relative poverty, poor people are the ones who do not have what is needed the most. Without a foundation to live a decent life is has become difficult to...
Poverty is a complex and growing problem in the United States. As of right now there is no solution. There are proposals and acts, such as Obama Care, that were enacted in an attempt to help people in poverty, and there are so many organizations, such as Habitat for Humanity and The Hunger Project, that try to aid people when they start to lack the necessities, like food and shelter. College students are graduating college with a large amount of student loans and no way of paying them off, people are being evicted from their homes, and employees are being laid off. The unemployment rate in the United States in 2015 was five percent, that’s about fifteen million people. It’s becoming difficult for people to find jobs, therefore making it hard for people to get back on their feet and start living a comfortable lifestyle. Poverty in the
Above all else, poverty tragically creates the environment that breeds the kinds of inherent predicaments that are without question troubling our great nation at this time: Social unrest, profound racial tension, criminal gangs, drug abuse, and social inequality. In order to put these dire or bleak circumstances to rest, we must build a political will to enact polices that will create economic security, expand opportunities, and grow the lower class or poor. It won’t be an easy task whatsoever but rebuilding the American economy and ending poverty requires that there are jobs or work available for Americans and American workers where there is legitimate access to jobs for every American who wants to earn an honest living. Therefore, the
Our SSI text explains that “the poor are reacting realistically to their situation”, in other words, the poor have learned to live with their situation and therefore they accept the fact that their values are as such because anything more would be unattainable for them (Kerbo, 2012). In this view of poverty, the reasons for poverty are not due to the differences from the poor and the middle class, it is due to their situations. I agree with this view of poverty more than the culture of poverty argument, because personally I feel most people in society are not complacent with being poor their entire lives. The situational view of poverty focuses on the social and economic circumstances that are the source of poverty instead of the individual reasons, like the attitudes, values and behaviors of the poor regarded with the culture of poverty view. There are certain times in some individual’s lives where they have to experience poverty, such as after an injury or a death in the family, they may experience poverty for a time, but it is not a learned trait through
society poverty has various definitions that lack the true picture that poverty depicts. Dictionary defines poverty as “the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money on material possessions.” In other words poverty is a situation where a person fail to earn a sufficient amount of income to purchase basic necessities such as food, shelter, clothes etc. In reality, poverty is much more than the capital resources. According to Laster Brown explained poverty as “the world without orders’ and further emphasized that “unfortunately it is a human condition. It is despair, grief and pain.” However, the issue of poverty and how we deal with it could differ among people. This idea is reflected in Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence and Morality” essay and the opposing essay written by John Arthur in “World hunger and moral obligation: the case against Singer.” Peter Singer raises the question of poverty and our obligations toward it in his essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”. In the essay, Singer addresses the question of what obligations we have toward those ar...
The society that humans exist in faces social problems everyday. Social problems can be unique to one society, or they can be universal. Poverty is a universal problem that is felt, and seen in every society, although what is seen as poverty in one society may not be seen as poverty in another society. You live in poverty when you are poor. Poverty can become a deadly trap to those affected, and leaves them unable to escape.
Many different types of people are affected by poverty. Some people are born into poverty and then live in poverty their whole life, this is called generational poverty. This type of poverty is fairly common because people get used to living a certain way and think that is the only way to live. Many middle class people also live in poverty, but it’s different than normal poverty, it’s called asset poverty. This is where people use credit to buy things so they appear to not be poor but are heavily in debt. The major reason people live in poverty is because they are uneducated, because of this they often can’t get a job that doesn’t pay minimum wage or close to it.
In the previous classes, we talked about how poverty is a societal problem not a monetary problem simply meaning giving every poor person more money isn’t going to simply make poverty vanish away. We said that poverty is an absolute measure. We live in a world where the rich keeps getting richer and the poor just keeps getting poorer. The song Sixteen Tons by Jonny Cash reminds me of inequality and debt. Most people in poverty live have to rely on food stamps which could be used for only certain items. Since most people in poverty don’t have any choices, they live from paycheck to paycheck if they are lucky enough to have a job. Most times, people in poverty have to borrow from payday loan lenders who charge a huge amount of interest on their