Summary Of Nickeled And Dimed

At a campaign rally in 1976 Ronald Reagan talked about welfare queens and poverty. He said, “She used eighty names, thirty addresses and fifteen telephone numbers to collect food stamps, social security and veteran’s benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands as well as welfare. Her tax free cash income alone has been running 150,000 thousand dollars a year.”The welfare system is full of gender stereotyping. Stereotyping is when we make perceptions on what we make about others. In the past forty years America welfare system has been designed around Reagan’s fake welfare queen (Black, Sprague). This slur has had negative effects for the families on welfare that urgently need support and are struggling. This paper will discuss the lies of the welfare queen and how it originated and its negative effects on African American families and young girls.

In the essay by Barbara Ehrenreich, titled Nickel and Dimed written in 2001. This article talks about how Barbara struggled through her low-income life at the time in Florida. Due to high rent and low wage, her experience shows us that the most middle-class Americans have a huge financial problem. Now, she wants to prove why economic crisis still exist in some parts of America.

In addition to all of those barriers for those impoverished to move themselves above the poverty level, another problem exists when we speak of those in poverty. These people, who receive such low wages without many benefits at work, often must live without proper health care. This creates a problem for the workers because they must not only work hard, for long hours, with little or no break at all; they often have no health care, which makes a simple

In Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America, author Barbara Ehrenreich analyzes and explains her experiences during her endeavor into living and working in low-wage America. Her ultimate ambition for attempting to live in this lifestyle is to introduce the reader to the difficulties that those with low incomes face. In order to grasp the true experience of entering the low-wage workforce, Ehrenreich essentially abandons her real life, leaving almost everything behind and starting with nearly nothing. By the end of her journey, Ehrenreich wants to answer the question of whether or not a single woman with children would be able to survive while working in low-wage America. Throughout her venture, she discovers several injustices and obstacles that low-wage workers are confronted by.

In Nickled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, I am still a little puzzled as to what the author’s purpose was with her experiment to briefly “live like the working poor in America.” She states she was concerned about the Welfare to Work program enacted 3 years prior and her “objective” experiment will allow her to make a conclusion on the effectiveness of the program. It appeared to me that she went into the experiment with a bias that the program will not work and it is an unreasonable, unrealistic, and unfair program. This is shown by her immediate statement, “The humanitarian rationale for welfare reform-as opposed to the more punitive and stingy impulses that may have motivated it …”. She then continues by using just the statistics

In the book Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich, who is a famous journalist and writer, she explores how low-wage workers survive in America by going undercover to learn for herself. Her project begins in Florida where she worked as a waitress. Her goal throughout the entire project was to manage enough money to pay a second month of rent. Ehrenreich fails at her first job . Ehrenreich then explores Maine where she begins living in a motel. Ehrenreich gets hired as a housekeeper at a nursing home and a maid . By the end of her time in Maine, Ehrenreich exposes who she really is. Ehrenreich then explores her last state, Minnesota. Ehrenreich finds a job as a retail worker and begins doing fine but later begins hating her job. It is to complicated looking at Ehrenreich's success or failure of the whole project because one can not say what one feels about the whole book because it is to long especially because ones paper to write is to short. Criteria is important because it brings satisfaction and it helps create a final decision. Did Ehrenreich show great effort during her project and were her experiences realistic? Although Ehrenreich slightly failed at experiencing

Throughout the book I learned that trying to live off minimum wage with average life is nearly impossible. It is impossible because the people work all day, they have no health care and they typing scavenge the food that is cheap. Listening sad I feel like life and the economy is unbalanced. ? I've learned that the author is very biased and to me it seems odd that she would change places with someone that makes a low minimum wage when she makes all the money that she needs to survive. So what would happen if you put a child in the mix with trying to live off minimum wage? Some things that I'm going to include in my research paper is the statistics that she states at the bottom of the pages. An example would be the quote “So begins my career at the Hearthside, where for two weeks I work from 2:00 till 10:00 p.m. for $2.43 an hour plus tips” The quote shows that Barbra cannot live off $2.43.Another is “…forced to live off the contents of his car and whatever food items he can scrummage

In ‘Nickel and Dimed’ by Barbara Ehrenreich, is about a journalist with a PhD in biology, who went to Florida, Maine and Minnesota to do research on how low-income families survive (Ehrenreich, 9). Dr. Ehrenreich, put herself into the daily life of a low-income worker, which over millions of Americans are working jobs for lower wage (Ehrenreich, 10). Chapter 1, consists of an introduction of the author and how she believes she has advantages like being white, native English speaker and being so well-educated that she even said should could never ‘experience poverty’ because of those advantages (11). Ehrenreich, first place is Key West, Florida, which is closer to her hometown and the first thing she did when she arrived is to apply for a job

The final chapter of Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich, “Evaluation”, states about low income families being almost invisible to the mid to high income families. This observation is valid because walking around places, Walmart, Kmart, etc., a person cannot distinguish what class the person is in. Poorer families are also rarely portrayed on television or other forms of entertainment, unless the show is about people getting arrested, since most people only find higher class, comfortable people interesting.

“Nickel and Dimed” by journalist Barbara Ehrenreich is the recollection of Ehrenreich's experiment to examine the economic conditions that the working poor in America had to endure after a major welfare reform, which made welfare less of a “safety net” and encouraged recipients of welfare to be reliant on a job and a job alone. With just a car, a couple thousand dollars, and a PhD in biology, Ehrenreich went undercover in a few states in America to take on the minimum wage life herself, and prove her claim that the working poor are being undermined by the covert and unjust class system in America. Her claim proved to be true several times throughout her experiment. In each state, she needed at least two jobs to pay for just her bare necessities, which led to exhaustion. It was so difficult for her to manage two

The main Topic of Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich is how labor and poverty are used when working and how people have to go through these conditions in order to survive. In the beginning, Barbara Ehrenreich was an undercover journalist search to find the truth behind minimum- wage works. Throughout the book she wrote about people she met and their issues, a boy named George was an example of labor and injustice because he was accused of stealing but it was never proven. Ehrenreich main goal is being able to pay her bills. But she then realizes has to get two more jobs to manage. Hard work has been a huge impact in poverty because of the horrible conditions workers have to go through in order to keep their jobs. Even when times there are

In Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich proclaims that while on a mission to experience the struggles in the everyday life of the poor, she will never be able to fully understand what it’s like to be in that situation. Throughout her journey, she comes across many different people and job opportunities, making for a different outcome every time. Although there was variation of variables, her response to troubling situations was always the same: giving up.

Harsh realities and low wages, which are terrible things to have in your life, are discussed in Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Nickel and Dimed. In the chapter Serving in Florida, Ehrenreich shares her experiences trying to live on a number of low wage jobs and the people she knew who worked one low wage job. She uses anecdotes to argue about what it is like to work low wage jobs.

The health care industry is a very powerful industry that most people rely heavily on throughout their lives. Chapter thirty in our text book covers both income and poverty along with healthcare. Healthcare is related to both income and poverty because sometimes people become poor due to not having adequate health insurance and use much of their income on medical bills. Some people will also apply for jobs just because of the employer’s heath care package for their employees. Health care/insurance is important part of life.

Monopoly is one of the most widespread board games in the world as is portrayed by the fact that it has been created in several languages and sold in more than eighty countries. It is a source of entertainment for both children and adults and has been in its present design for more than sixty years without any notable amendments. The game can be traced to the early twentieth century and was created by Elizabeth Magie as “The Landlord’s Game”. The author intended to depict the economic concerns of Ricardo’s Law of Economic rent as well as other notions of economic privilege and land value taxation. However, the original intention for the development of the pastime is not so far from the economic inequality that is illustrated by the manner