The Invisible Poverty Of Other America By Peter Dreier

Poverty has always been with us from beggars outside the gates of Jerusalem to the mentally ill homeless woman in the park. America is known for our huge difference in culture and class. This is due partly to the dynamics behind the political decisions of this country. The president himself admits that America is more unequal than it’s been since the great depression and many of his own supporters say he has failed. America now has, by many standards, the lowest social mobility of all of the high-end countries, meaning that a child born into poverty is likely to grow up as a poor adult. This is surprising for a country that not only prides itself as being a middle class society, but as the society where anyone can make it and where

Author Bryan Stevenson (2014) writes, “The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned”(p.18). According to the non-profit, Feeding America (2016), in 2015, 43.1 million, or 13.5%, of people in the United States were impoverished. Poverty is a vicious cycle, trapping people and families for generations. The inability to escape poverty is due in part to difficult class mobility in the U.S. but also because certain factors reinforce the idea and state of poverty. Bryan Stevenson’s bestseller Just Mercy, Lindsey Cook’s article “U.S. Education: Still Separate and Unequal”, Michelle Alexander’s excerpt “The Lockdown”, and Sarah Smarsh’s “Poor Teeth” all explore the idea of poverty and the systems that sustain it. While all four readings focus on poverty differently and explore it using different techniques, they all share similar big picture ideas about how poverty is fortified through systematic, societal, and psychological efforts.

When most people think of the average welfare recipient they most likely imagine someone who is a slacker; unambitious and one who is not a hard worker, someone who lazes around waiting until their welfare check comes in so that they can spend it all on whatever frivolous thing they want, and wait until the next check arrives. Sometimes people think of a mother and her children in a poor neighborhood, who wants more money to spend on expensive clothes and electronics, so she gets her welfare checks and buys the expensive yet unnecessary items without using the money to get out of a bad financial situation, contented to live this way without working towards anything better. Nobody would be in support of a system that gives undeserving people their own tax money. However, that is not what welfare looks like. Welfare looks like overworked parents who are doing the best they can, but still don’t have enough to put a meal on the table. Welfare looks like people afraid to lose their homes and willing to do almost anything to just keep living. Welfare looks like the mentally disabled, who despite trying their hardest, need more help. This is what welfare looks like; people in need who strive to live a better life. Welfare helps families in need not only by giving them money but by aiding them with every aspect of their lives such as food, shelter, and more to improve the quality of their life.

In the United States one third of the population receives benefits from the government and although some do need it and use it honestly there is a large majority of welfare users who misuse and abuse it. For example there are people who spend their welfare check on items that are not needed when they go to the grocery store the main use for their check should be to buy healthy and necessary items for their family but instead they like to buy overpriced brand named foods. There are even people who try to use the money given to them to buy alcohol, cigarettes, guns, strip clubs and some even go gamble with it. These kinds of people are the ones who give this program a bad reputation and less chance for those who do actually need it to receive

David K. Shipler is the author of various books, including The Working Poor: Invisible in America. While this book is one of his most famous, Shipler also wrote Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Shipler was born in New Jersey in 1942, where he grew up and went to school. After highschool he attended Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire, which is a Private Ivy League College and one of only nine colleges chartered before the American Revolution. After graduating college, he became a U.S. Navy Officer for two years. Shipler then became a New York Times new clerk; he covered domestic issues for five years and then traveled to Saigon for two years to cover issues involving

In the past twenty years, welfare fraud and abuse has become an overwhelming problem. Large numbers of people are living off the government alone, with no attempt of finding work. Our welfare system is out of date and needs to be slimmed down. Congress needs to eliminate the mindset of Americans that welfare can be used as a free ride through life.

Also, with little regulations on government assistance, it is easy for people to do things like, sell their food stamps. Growing up, my mom was on drugs. She did not work, therefore she got food stamps and Medicaid. She would sell her food stamps to her friends, that way she would get the cash instead. Then she would spend that cash on drugs. This happens quite often. This is another personal example of welfare

Emily Badger said in The Washington Post “The reality, though, is that a tremendous share of people who rely on government programs designed for the poor in fact work — they just don't make enough at it to cover their basic living expenses (Badger).” To even go a little further, according to the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education seventy-three percent of individuals who benefit from assistant programs in the U.S, live in a household where at least one individual is earning/bringing in an income. Even with that income they just cant afford the tedious things such as medial bills, paying for childcare/daycare services, or buying groceries after they receive their paycheck or get done paying all of the other bills that factor into everyday life (Badger). If there was a crack down on the requirements for welfare, yes it may be a little harder to receive but for people who TRULY need it would get it. As long as one can prove that they cannot make all of their bills and provide their family with all of the necessities with the income they have, they should absolutely receive welfare. If you do not have a job you should be given the option to either find a job by a certain deadline, or participate in community service. If half of the individuals who abuse welfare we caught, and forced to

Many people living in poor neighborhoods might have been to prison, have had little to no education, or even health problems. There are over six million ex-convicts in the United States. Research proposes that the best way for them to stay out of prison again is to reintroduce them into the working world and finding them jobs, but most employers are hesitant in giving them a chance. With an unemployment rate approaching its highest, getting employed is challenging. If someone has been in prison, the chance of them getting a job decreases drastically. In chapter five of David K. Shipler’s The Working Poor: Invisible in America, Shipler emphasizes on attaining a job, maintaining a job, and living while employed to successfully construct his arguments

Sometimes life hits you hard, one day you are living paycheck to paycheck, the next day you lose your job and you wonder how you are going to live at all. So you gather your pride and stand in line to ask for assistance. For some, this process is humiliating, for others it is a way of life. Welfare was developed to help Americans suffering through the Depression. At some point it went from providing assistance to becoming a crutch to those who did not want to work. The government decided I was time to put an end to the abuse of the welfare and the Republicans pushed for reform of the system. In many ways the reform did more harm than good and there is a fine line between reform and the edge of poverty. With that being said, many Americans still

The old myths were trotted out despite some important new books that should have worked to dispel them. Most notably, Martha J. Bailey and Sheldon Danziger have recently released Legacies of the War on Poverty (Russell Sage Foundation, 2013), arguably the definitive analysis of what worked and what didn’t, how our most cherished poverty-fighting institutions had their roots in that war, and why the expansive

How are People Benefiting correctly from the Welfare System? A 25 year old by the name of Linda is a Dallas mother of four, and is leading one of those complicated lives. She used to work, but after her children's father left, she couldn't afford child care and had to quit and go on welfare. After another relationship turned abusive she moved to a domestic abuse shelter program. On top of it all, she says, "I have problems in my head." She has been attending some life skills classes but has no immediate plans of getting a job. "Some of us do have problems," she says. "We're looking for a little help.” (Teresa Wiltz) More than 45 million people, or 14.5 percent of all Americans, lived below the poverty line last year, The Census Bureau reported.

Throughout history, there have always been people willing to work for what they want, and those who expect things to be handed to them as if it was a natural-born right. While the welfare system does positively impact some families in need, many people take advantage of it. With this being a well known fact, the government still continues to use ten percent of the federal budget on welfare (“Budget” 1).

While it has proven to be difficult to end poverty in America, Peter Edelman is optimistic. In his book So Rich, So Poor Edelman makes a call to action. There are four prominent ideas that underpin Edelman’s reasoning throughout the book: (1) More people must understand why poverty is still so prevalent in America; (2) extreme poverty must be taken into consideration as a shocking 6 million Americans’ sole income was food stamps in 2011. This fact alone creates a sense of urgency that drives Edelman; (3) increasing income inequality should be treated as a moral issue; and (4) bold political action will be required if substantive progress will be made in alleviating poverty.

Ronald Reagan once said, “We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won.” I read the book, Dancing in the dark by Morris Dickstein. This book was about the great depression, and the impacts it had on American life. The traditional thought of poverty, people dying of hunger and people lying in the roads, has been erased. America has abolished poverty by the traditional standards but the thought of poverty and what it is has changed. In America we consider poverty to be spending all your money on bills, so you have no money left for food to feed your family. We consider poverty to be just being poor. One-Third of our population makes less than $38,000. This is not enough to be able to be above the poverty line. Anything below this