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Ways to solve poverty
How does poverty impact peoples lives
Ways to solve poverty
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Stereotyping the Poor Poverty is a potential outcome for everyone. It’s sneaky and many people fall victim to it every year. No one believes that they have the potential to fall into debt, but it can happen through a string of bad luck, time running short, and other possibilities that can’t be controlled. People who are struggling with difficulty believe that there is no way out because no one will help them. However, there are ways for us, as a society, to help those who are short on income receive the help that they need. Many of the impoverished are thought to be slackers, addicts, or self-destructive to their lives. Society can help each other by dismembering the stereotypes given to people who are underneath the “Poverty Line” that they used as wedges between the classes. Labels given to those who’re poor have nothing to do with who they are as humans. …show more content…
When people hear about poor people, they think of bums who steal and do drugs all the time. Society believes that they steal to avoid paying a few dollars on something that they need. People raise prices on healthier and much needed nutritious foods. The increase of price makes that food out of reach for people who can barely afford a place to live. In the book, Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America, by Linda Torado, Barbara Ehrenreich explains that being poor “… means having no privacy, since the boss has the legal right to search your belongs for stolen items” Poor people are on a tight leash and are constantly “… under suspicion of drug use and theft” (2). People who are facing financial hardship can lose their homes if they don’t pay their rent on time. They struggle to live through every week with the right necessities needed to
More often than not, the homeless are viewed as weak and helpless. They are seen in movies as street beggars, and are vehicles of pity and remorse to touch the hearts of the viewers. Moreover, the media trains its audiences to believe that homelessness comes from the fault of the person. They are “bums, alcoholics, and drug addicts, caught in a hopeless downward spiral because of their individual pathological behavior” (427). In reality, it is the perpetuating cycle of wealth that keeps them in at a standstill in their struggles. The media only condones this very same cycle because it trains the masses to believe that people are poor due to their bad decisions. This overall census that the poor are addicts and alcoholics only makes it easier to drag their image further through the mud, going as far as calling them “crazy.” This is highlighted in shows such as Cops, or Law & Order. With the idea that these people are bad news it is easy to “buy into the dominant ideology construction that views poverty as a problem of individuals” (428). Although some of the issues of the poor are highlighted through episodic framing, for the most part the lower class is a faceless group who bring no real value to the
In The Working Poor: Invisible in America, David K. Shipler tells the story of a handful of people he has interviewed and followed through their struggles with poverty over the course of six years. David Shipler is an accomplished writer and consultant on social issues. His knowledge, experience, and extensive field work is authoritative and trustworthy. Shipler describes a vicious cycle of low paying jobs, health issues, abuse, addiction, and other factors that all combine to create a mountain of adversity that is virtually impossible to overcome. The American dream and promise of prosperity through hard work fails to deliver to the 35 million people in America who make up the working poor. Since there is neither one problem nor one solution to poverty, Shipler connects all of the issues together to show how they escalate each other. Poor children are abused, drugs and gangs run rampant in the poor neighborhoods, low wage dead end jobs, immigrants are exploited, high interest loans and credit cards entice people in times of crisis and unhealthy diets and lack of health care cause a multitude of problems. The only way that we can begin to see positive change is through a community approach joining the poverty stricken individuals, community, businesses, and government to band together to make a commitment to improve all areas that need help.
The article “As American As Apple Pie” is about, poverty and welfare and how they are looked down upon and treated with suspicion or outright antagonism, and how many associate those in poverty with negative stereotypes often seen as deviant such as homeless, lazy, and criminals. Mark R. Rank points out how poverty across the world is a lot more normal than we think it might be. Some people are at greater risk than others, depending on age, race, gender, family structure, community of residence, education, work skills, and physical disabilities. This article provides the readers with data and analysis of American poverty and welfare over the course of the past 25 years. Rank also talks about how we have framed the poverty issue, and how we should frame it.
Although poverty has minimized, it is still significant poverty which is characterized by a numerous amount of things. There are two types of poverty case and insular. “Case poverty is the farm family with the junk-filled yard and the dirty children playing in the bare dirt” (Galbraith 236)Case poverty is not irretraceable and usually caused if someone in the household experiences “ mental deficiency, bad health, inability to adapt to the discipline of industrial life, uncontrollable procreation, alcohol, some educational handicap unrelated to community shortcomings” (Galbraith 236).Case poverty is often blamed on the people for their shortcomings but on some levels can be to pinpoint one person's shortcomings that caused this poverty. Most modern poverty is insular and is caused by things people in this community cannot control. “The most important characteristic of insular poverty is forces, common to all members of the community, that restrain or prevent participation in economic life and increase rates of return.
Whenever you do not own something that everybody else owns, what can you do not to feel left out? I’ll answer that, most teens decide to steal. Delinquency results among these teens because lower-class values, or focal concerns, encourage behaviors defined as deviant by middle class standards. The delinquent teens do not know better, and sometimes do it to fit in. Also, once they can finally own something they never did their whole own life for free, they go for it. For many people living in poverty, crime is seen as the only opportunity for achieving a higher level of socioeconomic status. Delinquency rates rise daily due to poverty and the only ones we can blame is
In addition, the poor are overburdened they always have been, especially in 2014. This is owing to the fact that the middle class is close to disappearing, which is forming a large gap between the poor and the rich. Furthermore, banking can be more expensive for nearly all poor people, whom are usually put in extreme circumstances where they are required to pay more taxes. And the poor are usually shut out from society and are left on the street as if they were a piece of garbage, which is why it is particularly difficult to attain a job as a poor person. Not many people in the world care for the poor. It is surprising to think that the poor had not been oppressed in 1791. Someone would think the poor have always had a heavy burden. The majority of America’s population is poor and they are ignored and portrayed as aliens whom we should have no contact with.
As stated by Franklin D. Roosevelt, “the test of our progression is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” Many people may agree with this statement considering that the United States is such a wealthy country and in 2012, 46.5 million people were living in poverty in the United States and 15% of all Americans and 21.8% of children under age eighteen were in poverty.The honest truth is that many people do not know the conditions this group of people must live in on a daily basis because of the small number of people who realize the struggle there is not a great amount of service. In the article Too stressed for Success, the author Kevin Clarke asks the question “What is the cost of being poor in America?” and follows the question by explaining the great deals of problems the community of poverty goes through daily by saying, “Researchers have long known that because of a broad reduction in retail and other consumer choices experienced by America's poor, it is often simply more expensive to be poor in the United States.
In order to be radical about poverty, we need to understand the difference between wealth and income. Income is a transfer of money by working or by gifts. On the other hand, wealth is more of a total of accumulated assets that has been stored for a period of time (Conley, pg. 253). Wealth is not distributed equally among the public. (NCH, 2016, http://nationalhomeless.org/about-homelessness/). Declining wages has also caused a lot of stress and increase people’s inability to pay for their housing or other needs. If there are affordable housing, it’s usually in an unsafe and polluted environment or it’s extremely overcrowded that people have a higher chance of being homeless or inadequate housing arrangements than getting their applications accepted (Why Are People Homeless Research, 2016, NCH). Also, privatizing housing will increase the accumulation of wealth of the power elite or those that own property and lands by their pricing in rents. Most people go through depression because of loss of home, jobs, or a sense of self. Often times, the lack education about health and they don’t receive adequate support for medical care if they are homelessness. Poverty is also treated as a criminal offence and if people were to ask for public assistance, they have to prove their eligibility. If they have a criminal record, they are
Poverty is a complex and growing problem in the United States. As of right now there is no solution. There are proposals and acts, such as Obama Care, that were enacted in an attempt to help people in poverty, and there are so many organizations, such as Habitat for Humanity and The Hunger Project, that try to aid people when they start to lack the necessities, like food and shelter. College students are graduating college with a large amount of student loans and no way of paying them off, people are being evicted from their homes, and employees are being laid off. The unemployment rate in the United States in 2015 was five percent, that’s about fifteen million people. It’s becoming difficult for people to find jobs, therefore making it hard for people to get back on their feet and start living a comfortable lifestyle. Poverty in the
Many different types of people are affected by poverty. Some people are born into poverty and then live in poverty their whole life, this is called generational poverty. This type of poverty is fairly common because people get used to living a certain way and think that is the only way to live. Many middle class people also live in poverty, but it’s different than normal poverty, it’s called asset poverty. This is where people use credit to buy things so they appear to not be poor but are heavily in debt. The major reason people live in poverty is because they are uneducated, because of this they often can’t get a job that doesn’t pay minimum wage or close to it.
Many people don’t know the right meaning of poverty. Poverty is different in every part of the world one goes to. Many people think that the meaning of poverty is just when someone is very poor. It’s true, but it goes into a deeper meaning than just poor. Poverty is when a person cannot provide for themselves or their family.
This analysis is not intended to suggest that because it is often functional, poverty should exist, or that it must exist. For one thing, poverty has many more dysfunctions that functions: for another, it is possible to suggest functional alternatives. For example, society’s dirty work could be done without poverty, either by automation or by paying “dirty workers” decent wages. Nor is it necessary for the poor to subsidize the many activities they support through their low-wage jobs. This would, however, drive up the costs of these activities, which would result in higher prices to their customers and clients. Similarly, many of the professionals who flourish because of the poor could be given other roles. Social workers could provide counseling to the affluent, as they prefer to do anyway; and the police could devote to traffic and other organized crime.” Poverty is a thing of deviance in today’s world of society. The poor and less fortunate are an aggregate of society. Though poverty is shown to be a negative there are several positives to it as shown by Gans in his report. Poverty is a universal problem, but with the positive outlook on the problem it can be better. Poverty strikes almost everywhere around the world and impacts several people even not living in poverty. Though the positives that may be looked at as good are completely wrong compared to the bad. The struggles some people endure through poverty are just completely unjust and inhumane at times. With all the events that have occurred with job loss and other economic problems this has created a huge struggle for middle and lower class americans. Poverty is a problem that is always a work in progress to fix, but maybe eventually it will all be
No one person is born poor, although they may be born into a poor family or community, and therefore the focus should be on the society and the forces which created poverty that affect the lives of these people and cause them to be socially excluded. There are many forces which contribute to the exclusion of poor people from society, some of which include but not limited to Power, Class, Gender and Racial discrimination etc. These causes goes on to having negative such as poverty, Unemployment, inequality, Poor Health, homelessness, lack of education and training, poor social welfare etc. on the lives of these group of people.
There are two ways to categorize poverty from a sociologist viewpoint. Absolute poverty simply refers to the condition in which one is unable to afford the necessities of life, whereas relative poverty refers to the condition in which one is unable to afford that which is considered a normal standard of living in society. Absolute poverty is far more worse than relative poverty because they could quite possible not have a house or food to live on for everyday survival. There are basically five different categories in which each poverty stricken person can be placed in. The first category are those who are not able to work because they are too old, too young, disabled, or tied down by social responsibility. The second category are those who are able and qualified to work but can not find work. The third category are those who are not equipped to fill available jobs either because they are undereducated or because their skills have become outdated. The fourth category are those whose social and personal problems have brought them to a point of self-defeating discouragement. The last category are those who are underpaid, or unable to get a fair price for what they have to sell. After defining which people are in poverty, these categories can answer my question of why are they in poverty and how they can be helped.
The United States government classifies the word poverty based “on the minimum amount of money a family requires to meet its basic needs, such as food and shelter.” “In the United States, thirty-four million people live below the official poverty line (i.e., $17,960 for a family of four). "If poverty is a disease that infects the entire community in the form of unemployment and violence, failing schools and broken homes, then we can't just treat those symptoms in isolation. We have to heal that entire community,” by Barack Obama.1