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Alleviation of poverty
low income families food insecurity
strategies for the alleviation of poverty essay
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Could you imagine sitting down to make a grocery list for the upcoming week and only having $50.00 to feed your child and yourself? Could you imagine depending on your small child getting breakfast and lunch from school to ensure your food at home will last for the rest of the week? Or, could you even imagine having grits as the only edible option in your cabinet?
This is the life of many poor families in America today, including me. I have faced this struggle every month while attempting to find a strategy to make sure my child and I have nutritional meals to last throughout the month. I along with many poor Americans, desperately depend on the beginning of the next month to have something to eat.
“Prudence or Cruelty?” by Nicholas Kristof,
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What is the issue at the core? The answer that I concluded was how qualified am I to secure a career earning enough to provide essentials to our livelihood such as food, shelter and upkeep, and transportation? Being I couldn’t sing, play a sport, or have a talent that would make me rich or college degree to earn a higher wage, I was left with options of minimum wage at $10.50 an hour in California. At that rate my monthly income would be $1,680 monthly putting me above that poverty line of $1,335 monthly. At this point in my analyzations, I realized $1,680 is not enough to sustain stable food, shelter and upkeep, or transportation. So to my opponents, I would be hurting myself by making the decision to not work and stay on food stamps. But, are my opponents taking into consideration the reasoning to the decision made and how it will fix the issue at the core in the long …show more content…
If only 3% is committing fraud, than 97% of families receiving benefits really need it. Is it humane to not aid the 97% that really need help? Once again there are solutions to decreasing the small amount of fraud being committed instead of slashing the program all together. There are already programs in place, such as GAIN or Grow, to help beneficiaries get help with resumes, get job training, go to school, and help the beneficiaries place themselves in a position for the long-term. Another solution would be to add more programs or ensure the programs already in place is
It seems like the Welfare system treats its recipients with disrespect and shame to discourage them from joining the system. The people who made and run Welfare in the 1990s made Welfare into a blame game and forces recipients to solely blame themselves for their poverty. The moral prescriptions in individually getting rid of poverty according to TANF are the Work Plan/Family Plan. The focuses on work and family are contradictory because of how little time there is to get both goals done and each goal perpetuates the idea that it is the most important part of ending poverty. It seems like Welfare is more about getting people off of Welfare than eradicating poverty. There is a difference in the goals and that is reflected in how the recipients are treated and how Welfare is run.
For the past year I have watched my younger sister struggle to support herself and her now 11 month old baby. She makes more than minimum wage. She has struggled to the point where she was evicted and now lives with me. I have also experienced struggling on low pay. When I was 18 I was kicked out of my family’s house, and I was only making $8 an hour. There were days where I had to choose between paying rent and getting my electricity shut off, just because I couldn’t work enough hours to pay all of my bills. It can be very scary to only make minimum wage and have to support yourself. There are changes that need to be made so that every person can live properly with any job.
How often does one think about when his/her next meal will be? If you are the average American, the answer will most likely be “in a couple of hours”; however, there is a good chance that you might also be one of the fifty million Americans that would most likely answer “I don’t know… whenever I can afford it, I guess.” Roughly every one in six Americans would have some sort of response like the one presented because that is how many are considered food insecure. This is obviously one of the most important social problems afflicting America in modern times, but what can be done about it? A Place at the Table displays three scenarios: Barbie, a struggling mother of two; Rosie, a fifth grader living meal
The United States is known as the wealthiest country in the world. But, there are many people that can't afford to buy food for their families, many are also homeless. “While hunger affects people of all ages, it's particularly devastating for children even short-term episodes of hunger can cause lasting damage."(“Child Nutrition Programs") Child hunger in the United States is caused by poverty, unemployment, food insecurity, and food shortage; however there are many solutions to this problem like FRAC strategies, food banks, summer feeding programs, and backpack feeding programs.
Poverty is regarded as the major cause of food insecurity. A household food security depends on access to food. America has access to good healthy food. However, a family too poor to buy them do not enjoy food security. Rosenbaum and Neuberger (2005) report that each year the number of people using government food assistance programs grows. “Food stamps are targeted to those with the greatest need for help in purchasing food… [and] helps to lessen the extent and severity of poverty (Rosenbaum and Neuberger 2005)”.
Food insecurity refers to the state of being without reliable access to a sufficient quantity of adequate, nutritious food. A direct correlation has been distinguished between food, income and overall health (Noreen et al. 2001). Food insecurity has been strongly influenced by financial constraints, resulting in individuals choosing to manage their food expenditures and dietary choices based off of what they can afford (McIntyre et al. 2016). Additionally, food insecurity leads to the altering of eating patterns for adults and ultimately hunger in children; due to depletion of resources and food supplies. Households experiencing food insecurity are commonly lacking sufficient funds for food and acquire several health problems as a consequence. Food insecurity was significantly associated with poor health, multiple chronic conditions, obesity, anxiety, distress and depression (Noreen et al. 2001). Therefore, this is an issue of importance to public
The United States’ welfare system is designed to help its citizens live regular and full lives with all the opportunities that higher class citizens are exposed to and to help the unemployed look for long-term work so financially, they can become stable. This assistance is very beneficial (especially to the lower class) but annually, thousands of cases of welfare fraud are committed. The poor do not realize that this program does them the favor and is not a requirement by the government. The welfare system is a great assistance to the needy but these programs do not enable the receivers to become motivated to get off the program; instead it makes them more dependent towards the welfare system and receivers tend to want more and more assistance as time goes on. If welfare fraud continues to occur, the United States should let the people that absolutely need it receive their assistance regularly and target those who need it less and make the qualifications for welfare more complicated and tedious so to make it harder for those to receive welfare benefits, to help prevent welfare fraud, and to make people less anxious to apply for welfare if they don’t need it as much.
The individual most harshly affected by poverty are those who are the most powerless to do anything about it--children. Research indicates that extreme poverty in the first five years of life alters a child’s chances in life compared to lesser degrees of poverty in later life. This is the result of several key factors. The first problem associated with poverty is poor nutrition. It has been proven that poor nutrition leads to lower intelligence, poor physical development, and diminished immunity to disease. “Children deprived of proper nutrition during the brain’s most formative years score much lower on tests of vocabulary, reading comprehension, arithmetic, and general knowledge. The more severe the poverty a child faces, the lower his or her nutritional level is likely to be (Brown and Pollitt 38-43).” Government assistance to poor families such as WIC help; however, the guidelines for eligibility fall woefully short of making sure that every child has adequate nutrition. As stated previously, the federal guidelines for poverty are ludicrous when applied to real world economics. To further complicate matters, guidelines used by agencies such as the United States Department of Health and Human Services serve to painfully remind the poor that they are a nuisance to be eliminated. A child that goes to school hungry, even if not malnourished, will have greater difficulty focusing their efforts than a well fed one. An individual who is hungry will eventually become hypoglycemic, a condition in which blood sugar levels fall. The symptoms of hypoglycemia range from fatigue, sleepiness, irritability, headache, and decreased mental alertness. Many children that are perceived as ...
1.) The poverty line is disputed to be set too low by some, in order for poverty to be present there has to be many unfortunate circumstances existing, in other words, the standard of living for those in poverty has to be barely livable. Our SSI text states that the official definition of poverty in regards to nutrition is that a person is expected to live on less than a dollar per meal, this is not a healthy way to live long term (Kerbo, 2012). Another criticism of the poverty line is that it is measured on income prior to taxes being taken out. This means there are many families that are absolutely living in poverty but are not accounted for or even considered for any government benefits because of the way the income is calculated. One other
In the year 2015, around 40 million U.S. citizens were food insecure (Randall para. 3). Food insecurity can be defined in paragraph 3 by “[having] difficulty at some time during the year providing enough food for all their members due to a lack of resources. This 12.7% of American citizens also contains another group - children. Aged 10-17, 6.8 million adolescents struggle with a food insecurity. There have been several years of cuts to the social programs designed to help these people, along with the Great Recession continuing to leave an impact on the U.S. economy (para. 6). Under the Obama administration, $8.6 billion was cut from the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as Food Stamps. From 1993-2001 under the Clinton administration, former President Bill Clinton’s administration “gutted the welfare system” (para. 15). Because of these budget cuts, the families who rely on food assistance from the government have been allotted less throughout the years. From a sociological perspective, the concepts of sociological imagination, class stratification, and social location are in effect when it comes to child hunger in the United States. Being hungry is an issue larger than any one individual can control.
Utilitarianism is a moral theory that approaches moral questions of right and wrong by considering the actual consequences of a variety of possible actions. These consequences are generally those that either positively or negatively affect other living beings. If there are both good and bad actual consequences of a particular action, the moral individual must weigh the good against the bad and go with the action that will produce the most good for the most amount of people. If the individual finds that there are only bad consequences, then she must go with the behavior that causes the least amount of bad consequences to the least amount of people. There are many different methods for calculating the utility of each moral decision and coming up with the best
In the United States of America, the richest nation of the world, one in six Americans do not have enough food to eat. Have you ever wonder why there are so many food banks and food pantries throughout the country? They are not simply, as you thought, existent to offer emergency food assistance. Indeed, they are the main sources of food to millions of food-insecure Americans. Food insecurity, the state of not having sufficient quantity of affordable and nutritious food, has been very widespread and common in America. It affected millions of Americans and has been increasing dramatically in recent years; in 2012, more than 48 millions of food-insecure Americans rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) (McMillan). The depth
Should the torture of an innocent animal go unpunished? No, it should not; the real question is to what extent should the perpetrator be punished? The most basic definition of animal abuse is the intentional act of inflicting physical pain, suffering, or death on an animal; this includes monstrous neglect (the act of withholding food and water) that causes an animal to suffer, die, or be put in imminent danger of death. Currently, animal cruelty offenders are not punished to the extent that some believe they should be. Animal cruelty should receive mandatory jail time because the abuse towards an innocent animal is deemed inhumane and oftentimes is a precursor for violence against humans.
Alaimo, K., Olson, C. M., Frongillo, E. A., & Briefel, R. R. (2001). Food insufficiency, family income, and
Animal Cruelty has many forms, many reasons and most importantly many victims. It is a growing problem in today’s society. Many people may wonder why people abuse animals. The thought is simple, however the answer is a little more complex, there are three main types of animal cruelty. The three reasons are as follows: unintentional, intentional, and cruel intentions. I will discuss each one in more detail.