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Policies For Breaking The Cycle Of Poverty

Decent Essays

In this unit we looked at different policies for breaking the cycle of poverty and lifting people out of it. This cycle is isn’t impossible to break but it can seem like it to the people inside. Growing up in poverty raises the chance for a child to stay under the poverty line when they group. While there are obviously policies to help break the cycle, this is obviously still a big enough problem to millions of Americans. The inability to break this cycle creates a large barrier to people in poverty to escape. Nobody really wants poverty to continue, but at some level there needs to be separate economic classes in our society. The problem with the system now is that people don’t really have equal opportunity to move between these classes. The rich tend to stay rich and the poor tend to stay poor. This combined with the increasing gap between the poor and rich is making escaping the cycle of poverty even harder. This lack of mobility is what creates the inequality of opportunity. So if no one wants poverty to exist, why is there not a stronger push to end it or improve the conditions? The readings made clear that the problem isn 't in the effort, the problem is in THE approach taken. Currently, our collective belief about welfare is that it is only to be given to those who “deserve” it. This is the approach taken by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. This created stipulations requiring recipients to be employed in order to

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