$ 2 A Day Analysis

People are still living on $2 a day here in the United States. As one of the wealthiest countries in the world, how is it possible for people to live with this little amount of money? I know that I cannot. In $2.00 a Day, Jennifer Hernandez, a single mother with two kids, is a person who lives on $2 a day as she tries to survive and support herself and her kids in the collapsing economy. The minimum wage job for cleaning houses reinforces the cycle of poverty that Jennifer and her kids live in. This cycle of poverty reveals that there needs to be major changes to the economical infrastructure of the United States since the poor cannot get themselves out of poverty even though they actively look for work or have a job.

Poverty has many faces in different regions of the world. Poverty is not just the lack of money to buy food or cloth but it is intervened to our life’s in different ways. The video “living on One Dollar” I watched recently has made me to think about different aspects of poverty among Guatemalan people. The video show us the experiences of four students who came to live in Pena Blanca as part of the research. This video clearly explains that poverty is such a complex social issue and it is multifaceted. Living in poverty in Pena Blanca is totally different from poverty in our societies. In today’s

The minimum wage of today is not enough for Americans to live off. Nevertheless, obtaining two and three jobs to survive occurs to often and should not be consider a way to live in the United States. Workers of today making minimum wage simply do not earn enough to live off. As a result, they depend on the government to stay afloat. They apply for food stamps in order to buy food each month. Most or on some kind of public housing assistance, because they are

In the United States, the cost of living for a single adult with no children is an average of $28,474 every year (Career Trends, screen 1). This seems like a relatively low number, until the amount of people living together increases. A family of six, two adults and four children, rises to an annual cost of $82,900 (Career Trends, screen1). If an adult were to work full-time at minimum wage, they would only be getting $15,080 per year from their employer (University of California, screen 1). This amount of money is still about $14,000 short of how much it costs a single adult to live. In recent discussions of minimum wage, many people argue about whether it should be raised or not. Although the intentions to raise it are good, the outcome

The book $2.00 a day was written to acknowledge the struggle of those who live deep under the poverty line, if you can even consider that to be a living. It's two authors, Kathryn J. Edin & H. Luke Shaefer, show current (2015) real world examples from struggling single parents, homeless families, and those who have fell into a series of unfortunate events demonstrating how those who live in the $2.00 a day poor are not lazy, but instead the opposite. Throughout the trials of trying to find a job, keeping food on the table, and raising children, these people have been working much harder to stay alive in poverty than those who are fortunate enough to be living in the middle or upper class. As the book progresses through the different stories

In the United States alone, the amount of people in poverty is 14.5%. That equates to 45.3 million people in 2013. In a country like America, one of the world’s superpowers, it’s embarrassing to admit. But the main issue is to fix issues like these with the minimum wage and welfare. The minimum wage applies to workers who got a job whether because they were in school or because they had not gone to college and had no other option. Most of the country lives off as minimum wage workers as only 1% of the world’s population has a college degree. Minimum wage needs to be adjusted to modern inflation. But the minimum wage allegedly does not affect poverty at all says a large demographic and does not need to be adjusted. The minimum wage makes up a lot of the country and should be adjusted or modified to today’s standard of living.

After reading the book $2.00 a Day, Living on Almost Nothing in America. I was surprised to learn about the amount of people living below poverty in the United States of America. There are two sociological concepts that can be used to interpret this book. Social Class, and Conflict Theory. Social class is demonstrated by the lifestyle and perception of which social class you belong and how those of a different social class treat those of a lower class in addition to the struggle of those in the underclass which entails the harshest lifestyle with the almost certainty of never leaving the underclass. Conflict theory is demonstrated between the struggle of those who depend on Welfare, WIC and

Years ago in the late 1960s, a full-time worker earning the minimum wage could lift a family of three out of poverty (Vallas & Boteach, 2014). The rise of the cost for daily living over the years including groceries, medical bills, and raising children makes it impossible for a family to live off a minimum wage salary. “Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour and indexing it to inflation—as President Barack Obama and several members of Congress have called for—would lift more than 4 million Americans out of poverty” (Vallas & Boteach, 2014). This would extremely benefit the American people and the

As of right now, the federal poverty line does not adequately reflect the cost of living in America. $23,050 for a family for four does not properly factor in the expenses of housing, child care, health care, transportation and other basic needs in an expensive city such as New York, where a significant percentage of Americans live. As of 2015, the poverty line was one-fourth of the average annual budget of a family of four in New York City. The poverty line does not account for geographic inflation and is too low for a family of to live on. The government needs to raise the poverty line to include families on the border with a low quality of life. Government assistance would make life improvements possible for these

“$2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America,” by Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer, discuss the 1.5 million Americans with an income of only $2 a day. Throughout the book, Edin and Shaefer discover the strategies and living conditions of 18 families living on $2 a day by spending months and even years documenting them. The authors illustrate the troubling trend of a low-wage labor market that fails to provide a living wage. Beyond the data, this novel presents a memoir of rising poverty and income inequality in America. Marx’s conflict theory comes into play on how the poor and unemployed essentially fight against each other for basic human needs like food and water in order to survive.

No one denies living on less than $2/day as a single person is a struggle. Add to that the responsibility of children and potentially, extended family. This is the story of all too many people in the bottom 10% (and more) in the United States. Because such individuals receive the short-end of the stick, they feel compelled to trade in their SNAP benefits for cash, which are not that beneficial, regardless, because of the 2:1 payoff. In this novel, all of the individuals are portrayed as those who experience an unfair struggle which continues to perpetuate their emotional and financial misery. Don’t get me wrong, I sympathize with their plight, but I do know of, and have seen, in previous employment, many individuals who have capitalized on

The conditions that people who live on less than 1 or 2 dollars per day are atrocious. Anyone with humanitarian sympathy can see that these conditions must be improved. GiveWell, a coalition of charities geared toward

In the film Living On a Dollar a Day, four American college students attempted to live in Pena Blanca, Guatemala on the budget of the people living in the community. A majority of the people living in the village were farm workers and therefore did not have a steady source of income. Some days they may not make money at all and on days they do work they make little to nothing. Because of this their children are less likely to continue school, which continues the cycle of poverty. The message portrayed in the film is that small changes, make big impacts.

The poverty level in the U.S. is normally based on annual income figures. In 1995, a family was identified as poor if their income equaled $15,569. Adjustments, however, vary with inflation and family size. In short, by current U.S. standards, many poor people elsewhere in the world would be living near or in absolute poverty, surviving on just over $200-$500 per year (Funk & Wagnall 1).

With that said, the United States Census Bureau published the official poverty level report of 2014 in which 46.7 million people are living below quality standard. This alarming fact of recorded data, has the number of poor people or people living in poverty ranked as one of the largest since the start of publishing poverty statistics. In 2014 the poverty rate was 14.8%, which was down from 15.1% recorded in 2010. Household cash income for families was “less than half of the poverty line, or about $10,000 a year for a family of four” (World Hunger Education Service, 2016). It represented 6.6% of all people and 44.6% of those in poverty.