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"A revelatory account of poverty in America so deep that we, as a country, don't think it exists Jessica Compton's family of four would have no cash income unless she donated plasma twice a week at her local donation center in Tennessee. Modonna Harris and her teenage daughter Brianna in Chicago often have no food but spoiled milk on weekends. After two decades of brilliant research on American poverty, Kathryn Edin noticed something she hadn't seen since the mid-1990s -- households surviving on virtually no income. Edin teamed with Luke Shaefer, an expert on calculating incomes of the poor, to discover that the number of American families living on $2.00 per person, per day, has skyrocketed to 1.5 million American households, including about 3 million children. Where do these families live? How did they get so desperately poor? Edin has "turned sociology upside down" (Mother Jones) with her procurement of rich -- and truthful -- interviews. Through the book's many compelling profiles, moving and startling answers emerge. The authors illuminate a troubling trend: a low-wage labor market that increasingly fails to deliver a living wage, and a growing but hidden landscape of survival strategies among America's extreme poor. More than a powerful expose, $2.00 a Day delivers new evidence and new ideas to our national debate on income inequality. "--… (more)
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And as politicians whine about the increasing
What $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America shows is that the American welfare system, and specifically the reliance on the SnAP program, fails to provide for or protect its most vulnerable citizens. It looks generous on paper but in practice, but it leaves families without access to cash, vital for everyday life. Without cash they are unable to use public transport, pay bills, buy underwear, or school supplies, without having to resort to trading SnAP for half its worth on the dollar, selling blood, collecting cans, or illegal activities, such as prostitution, all for a few dollars.
Statistics show that the number of American families living on $2.00 per person, per day, has skyrocketed to 1.5 million American households, including about 3 million children, and the authors introduce the reader to eight families who are struggling to survive on incomes of $2.00 per person, per day or less.
The causes of such extreme poverty are complicated. ‘Get a job’ cries the middle classes, but with scarce unskilled work opportunities and exploitative employers, the answer is not that simple. Modonna worked as a cashier in one store for eight years but when her register came up $10 short after a shift she was fired, and even though the store later found the money, she received no apology nor an invitation to return to work. Unable to keep up with her rent she was evicted and she and her teenage daughter were forced into a homeless shelter, and despite applying for hundreds of jobs, Modonna remains unemployed.
And what of the children? Tabitha is one of thirteen children. She grew up with one set of clothes, sharing a mattress with seven of her siblings in a three bedroom apartment. They often went without food especially when their mother found it necessary to trade some of the SnAP she received, at almost half its value, for cash in order to pay the electricity or water bill. In tenth grade a desperate Tabitha agreed to sleep with one of her teachers who offered her food in exchange in for regular sex. In her junior year she was forced to leave home when she intervened in a fight between her mother and her abusive partner and the man issued Tabitha’s mother an ultimatum. Now eighteen she is finishing high school and has a place to live thanks to a boarding school scholarship, but she will graduate in a matter of months and though she’d like to go to college, there is no money to do so.
There are no easy solutions to the kind of poverty experienced by Modonna and her daughter, or Tabitha and her family, but its clear the current welfare system is failing. Without cash, many families have no hope of escaping the cycle of poverty, or surviving the experience without deep physical and emotional wounds. The authors argue for sensible reforms that would go some way to alleviating the plight of those living on $2.00 per person, per day.
This is an eyeopening and important book that will challenge your preconceptions of poverty, welfare and the poor. It is much harder to blame or condemn the homeless or unemployed (or dole bludgers in the Australian vernacular) for their circumstances when you understand the challenges they face.
“…the question we have to ask ourselves is, Whose side are we on? can our desire for, and sense of, community induce those of us with resources to come alongside the extremely poor among us in a more supportive, and ultimately more effective, way?”
As the authors reveal, most of today's extreme poor don't fit the old "welfare queen" stereotype. Rather, the men and women profiled in the book work hard every day, whether that means toiling at low-paying jobs for shady employers who routinely violate labor laws, or finding ways to generate small amounts of cash to lend dignity and freedom of choice to mostly cashless existences. Some sell their plasma, and others run "informal" (under the table) businesses. All dream of the day they can break out of the $2.00-a-day trap, but they have very limited means of doing so permanently.
In their conclusion the authors suggest a number of ways the government could help the poorest of the poor, including restoring the cash safety net and offering subsidized work programs. In today's economic and political climates, however, these proposals seem unlikely to be adopted.
$2.00 a Day is a quick, eye-opening read. I recommend it to all those who are concerned about the plight of the poorest Americans.
There was some discussion about housing insecurity in the book which made me want to read Evicted even more than I already did, but I am going to have to wait until I cool off a bit, I think.
The authors follow several of these families from different regions including big cities and small towns. There is a discussion of the history of welfare , how it was reformed in the '90s and the results of that reform and why so many fell through the cracks. They also suggest , in the last chapter, what we, as a country, can do about this waste of human talent.
Not a pleasant book to read but it has an important message.
Welfare in general is an incendiary topic. A majority of Americans disapprove of the concept of welfare, yet most Americans also think we aren't doing enough to help the very poor. The perception is a system filled with lazy welfare queens gaming the system at tax payer expense, but as in other discredited issues like voter fraud, the amount of abuse is negligible. Meanwhile we have people who's aspirations are nothing more than a meager job paying $12 per hour and enough hours to feed the kids and put a roof over their heads.
Edin does a good job presenting her thesis and is more an advocate of government job programs than cash give-aways. I tend to agree this is perhaps the best way to deal with a growing problem in part created by a shifting economy that leaves people unemployed with urgent need of retraining to more useful skills. Everyone who wants to work should be able to do so.
In this book Edin mixes the personal stories of families living in poverty with political history and analysis. Some salient points are the difficulties that people who have no cash have in finding a job--from lacking a telephone to respond to job enquiries, to lacking decent clothes for a job interview, to lacking transportation to get to the job. The people finding themselves in this position use their ingenuity to raise the funds to pay the rent--they sell their blood, if they are healthy enough. If they have transportation and a storage place, they collect cans and bottles to sell for recycling. One woman in the Mississippi Delta who lives in a housing project in a remote country area pays a friend to bring her to a grocery once a month where she buys supplies to set up a "snack shop" in her living room, where she sells Kool Aid, chips and other snacks at a small profit to other residents of the project. And, it is true that some recipients of food stamps resort to selling all or part of them for cash. Edin finds this to be an unsurprising result of the move to remove cash from welfare benefits--while the food stamps provide a basic level of food for sustenance, there are other expenses, like rent, for which cash is necessary. The food stamp recipient takes a big risk in trading some of the benefits for cash (it's harder now that what the recipients actually receive is something akin to a debit card that can be used for food), and receives a low return--perhaps 50%-60% of the value of the goods purchased with the card, and a potential fine of $250,000 and 20 years in jail. (Note the punishment for voluntary manslaughter is usually around 9 years.)
Together with Evicted, which I read earlier this year, this book is an eye-opening look at what it means to live in poverty in this day and age. Highly recommended.
3 1/2 stars
What's clear from the families interviewed is that
Edin and Schaefer aren't as negative about welfare reform as many liberals, but the book, whether intentionally or not, points up its flaws. First, AFDC was effectively abolished. Instead of just limiting it, it was block granted and states were permitted to spend the money on other things. Their incentive was simply to get people off the rolls--not to help them. At this point many recipients believe welfare doesn't even exist. Some are even told it isn't available by state workers. In Mississippi, recipients have declined from 180,000 at AFDC's peak to only 17,000 in 2014, and this is America's poorest state. Families are forced to rely on a variety of strategies to supplement the cash income they lack, some more legal than others, and the availability of nongovernmental resources varies widely. Programs like SNAP and the EITC have helped the slightly less poor by topping up their incomes, but EITC does not help the unemployed. SNAP, while improving nutrition significantly, also presents problems since it is sometimes traded at a discounted rate by the cashless (the authors are careful to note that welfare fraud is rare and has declined, but the poorest may have no other option). One family receives $1600 in SNAP for 11 people, but with almost no cash income, $600 has to be traded in for cash to pay the electric bill, leaving kids hungry. If it were all cash, $300 would not be lost. On the other hand, for those with cash income, SNAP enables cash to be reallocated and results in an increase in the food budget.
What this book makes clear is that the poor need more help. A lot of it. They need jobs that are stable, housing that is affordable and better quality, accessible childcare, and more. And yes--we need cash welfare to bridge the gap.
I wouldn't call this revolutionary--if you're familiar with actual poor people and work on poverty, the basic outline should be familiar. But the fieldwork and statistics are excellent and worth reading.
I recognize this as an important subject (which is why I wanted to read about it), but the delivery here is very dry and I just couldn’t keep my