Those in Poverty Impact Society as a Whole

Surviving in a world where money matters is not easy at all. Try living on less than a dollar and fifty cents a day. Go into a store and look for food enough for three meals that has enough nutrients for a balance diet all under a budget of $1.50. Fresh fruit and vegetables along with meat are out of the question, then what are the options? There really are none except a few canned and dried goods. There are people who live on this on a daily basis. The amount of people who live in poverty are over 1.4 billion and increasing daily. Society has not focused enough on social justice for those in poverty. “The working poor harvest sweet potatoes in time for Thanksgiving. They cut trees in time for Christmas. The fruit of their labor are in our lives every day, yet we rarely see them. Even when we encounter them face-to-face stocking shelves in Wal-Mart or checking us out at the supermarket, we do not see them as whole people, and we surely do not see them as poor. They are hidden in plain sight” (Edwards). People work minimum wage and receive barely enough assistance from the government to help support them. These people work and continue to work to make enough to survive one day at a time. The opportunities for those of low class compared to those in middle or higher levels of class do not match. These classes all receive different benefits, but more importantly those in poverty impact society as a whole.

The United States federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour whereas states such as Washington have it at $9.19. “In 2010, 72.9 million American workers age 16 and over were paid at hourly rates, representing 58.8 percent of all wage and salary workers. Among those paid by the hour, 1.8 million earned exactly the prevailing Federal mi...

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...o get their pay. The amount of people in the world who are in poverty are increase by the minute. If wages are increased like in Latin America, less people would be in poverty and would not need assistance from the governments. “European Commissioner for Development, Andris Piebalgs, commented: ‘...Big challenges lie ahead of us: ensuring that we achieve the Millennium Development Goals and make poverty a thing of the past. For the way forward we all need to work together - the global community should agree on an ambitious joint agenda for the eradication of poverty and sustainable development…’”(Europa). Poverty is a problem throughout the world, if every country acts together and pushes for no poverty, the people who work minimum wage would not experience this problem. Poverty would decrease and it would be as if it had never been a problem throughout the world.