Annemarie Fougerousse
Professor Hammett
English 1302
May 06, 2019
Poverty
Epidemic in America
Your alarm goes off and you start your day like normal:
eat breakfast, get dressed and catch the bus to work. Your work day is almost
over when your boss calls you in for an unexpected meeting and lets you know
that sales are short and they cannot afford to keep you employed. You start to
panic because you already have trouble paying your rent and grocery bills and
now you have no income. With livable paying jobs scarce, you don’t find another
job to pay for your old living situation; therefore, you are forced to take an
inadequate paying job somewhere else and move into a cheaper housing situation.
In one month, you have gone from living comfortably to having your life crumble
before your eyes, and there was nothing more you could have done to save it. This
is how many people in today’s society end up in poverty and needing the
financial support from our government. Being in poverty is when someone “lacks a usual or
socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions” (“Poverty”).
Many people are blind to the situation’s others go through, but we must take
action seeing that “21.3 million people live in deep poverty, with incomes
below 50% of their poverty thresholds” (“The Population of Poverty USA”).
Poverty is taking over America and should be a concern of everyone who lives
here and who cares about their fellow citizens. Poverty is becoming more and
more apparent therefore we need to stop this epidemic in its tracks before it
spreads any further, leading our country into further turmoil.
History
At
the beginning of the twentieth century, America was thriving. Women finally had
the ability to vote, cars and other innovations were being mass produced providing
citizens a sense of freedom, and “the nation’s total wealth more than doubled
between 1920 and 1929” (“The Roaring Twenties History”). The “Roaring Twenties”
were a time of change, rebellion and conflict but most historically important,
the decade that brought The Great Depression. The American economy seemed to be doing well
to civilians but quickly went downhill “when 16
million shares of stock were quickly sold by panicking investors who had lost
faith in the American economy” (“What Was the Great Depression and Why Did It
Start in the USA?”). On October 29, 1929, the now famous “Black Tuesday”,
16,410,030 shares were traded on the New York Stock Exchange causing the
economy to lose billions of dollars and “wiping out thousands of investors” (“Stock
Market Crash of 1929”). However, this stock market crash would not be the sole
cause of America plummeting into the Great Depression though it did accelerate
the global economic collapse.
The Great Depression was caused by a mixture of things: lack
of consumer spending, struggles in the agricultural sector of the economy due
to drought, the proliferation of consumer debt, overall low wages and of course
the Stock Market Crash of 1929 (“Great Depression History”). The president at
the time, Republican Herbert Hoover, assured the citizens that this “crisis
would run its course” and there was no need to make a fuss over it (1). However,
matters continued to worsen and by 1931, over 6 million Americans were
unemployed and looking for work (1). With the Hoover Administration finally
seeing the size of the situation, they “tried supporting falling banks and
other institutions with government loans” hoping the money would make its way
to the fallen businesses to hire back their employees (1). But this is all
Hoover did to help because he believed that “government should not directly
intervene in the economy, and that it did not have the responsibility to create
jobs or provide economic relief for its citizens” which is why Democrat
Franklin D. Roosevelt won a staggering victory in the 1932 election (1). It was
FDR who can be praised for pulling America through this hard time due to his
relief efforts such as the Works Progress Administration which helped employ
8.5 million people from 1935 to 1943, the Securities and Exchange Commission
which regulates the stock market to prevent abuse, Fireside Chats which were
radio conversations with the US citizens to provide comfort and the Social
Security Act which provides elderly citizens unemployment and disability
pensions (1). Due to Roosevelts actions, beginning in the spring of 1933, the
“real GDP grew an average rate of 9 percent per year” (1). Combine the growing
rate of the GDP and the enormous need for industrial production due to the
start of WWII, millions of jobs were needed to fulfill the war production which
“reduced the unemployment rate to below its pre-Depression level” finally
ending the Great Depression (1).
Jump into todays 21st century society and it is
apparent that although we are doing tremendously better than in 1929, we as a
nation are still struggling to pay our bills and live an acceptable lifestyle. Though
the average percentage of people who live below the poverty line has decreased
approximately 7% since then, the total number of people who live below the
poverty line has greatly increased by approximately 8 million citizens (“Poverty
in America: Then and Now”). This is partly caused by the increase in dollar of
amount of everything from houses, cars, gas, food, entertainment, apartments,
etc. all while the average salary from a part time/full time job has remained
stagnant; “We’ve
been drowning in a flood of low-wage jobs for the last 40 years” resulting in “104
million people — a third of the population — [having] annual incomes below
twice the poverty line, less than $38,000 for a family of three” (Edelman). So,
although we have made immense efforts towards “the war on poverty”, America is
no where near ridding itself of this vast epidemic.
Social Effects
Poverty in this day’s population can
create a wall in between friend groups and inner circles because often times
when friends want to hang out, they prefer to go to a restaurant or to the
movies to relax and enjoy themselves. When someone is having trouble
financially, they do not have the excess funds to go out and do these things
which hinders the time spent with their friends. Not only will they not have
the money to go out to places with friends, but they will not have time to
spend because they will have picked up an extra job or two to make ends meet.
This severely strains relationships within friend groups because they feel as
though all of their other friends are enjoying themselves without them and they
no longer feel like a part of the group. Though most of the time these
relationships are mendable, they are still one more battle people who are
already struggling have to deal with. Not only does poverty have a negative
effect on small friend groups but it also can affect the community as a whole.
For starters, poverty can easily divide a community into the people living in
poverty and the people living comfortably. This is because neither side feels
as though they can relate to each other; the people struggling assume the ones
living comfortably have no clue the battles they go through just to get food on
the table and the more affluent people can’t understand why the people in
poverty aren’t doing more to help themselves. The hard feelings only grow
stronger and it’s close to impossible to get them to see eye to eye to understand
what exactly the other person is really dealing with. Also, if a large number
of citizens in a community are living in poverty then the businesses in the
area will feel the repercussions. This affects the communal economy because
there will be a noticeable lack of money circulating and will affects even the
citizens who don’t have to watch their spending because of this.
Examples
One of the most recent examples of
poverty in America that brought a great load of attention to the issue was this
past winter when a polar vortex hit North America and negatively affected
thousands of homeless people on the streets, specifically in the Midwest: “The people most
at risk during such severe cold spells are the homeless population in the
affected areas”, such as Rockford, Illinois where temperatures dropped to a
record breaking negative 31 degrees and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where temperatures
dropped to negative 30 (Gajanan).
These
homeless people were put in severe danger for frostbite, hypothermia and even
death since “people who spend any time outside in freezing or sub-zero
temperatures can very quickly deteriorate and die in under 24 hours” (1). This
was the case for a 60-year-old homeless women in Lorain, Ohio, who sought
shelter from the cold in an abandoned house, only to contract hypothermia and
later be found dead (Allen). News channels brought attention to the large
numbers of homeless people on the streets who had to endure this polar vortex
but after the extreme temperatures had resided, people were quick to forget
about them. This shows that society can say they want to fix a problem over and
over again, but nothing will ever change until action is taken. It should not
take the homeless population literally freezing to death for us citizens to
help them in some way or provide assistance to them so they can help
themselves.
Another
recent situation that has added to a more communal homelessness crisis is
Hurricane Harvey, the hurricane that dropped 19 trillion gallons of water over
Houston, Texas, in late August and early September of 2017. Hurricane Harvey
lasted for approximately five days, reached category 4 as a hurricane and in “causing about
$125 billion in damage, Harvey
ranks as the second-most costly hurricane to
hit the U.S. mainland since 1900 (“2017 Hurricane Harvey: Facts, FAQs, and How
to Help”). Due to the flooding and wind
damage Harvey put onto millions of people’s homes, this hurricane is why so
many people in the Houston area are now relying on FEMA and insurance
companies to help them recover what they have lost. Unfortunately, many people
in the area did not have flood insurance. Therefore, “when volunteers interviewed the 1,614
unsheltered homeless, 18 percent said they were on the streets because of
Harvey, regardless of whether it was their first time to be homeless” (Ward). In destroying
people’s homes and possessions, this hurricane put thousands of people out of a
place to stay and on the roads, many of whom have to stay because they do not
have the money to recover what they have lost. Not all homeless people end up
on the street because they have made bad choices earlier in their life, but natural
disasters such as Hurricane Harvey have shown that someone can lose everything
at the drop of a hat and find themselves on the streets when they’re least
expecting it. This is why we should do more to help these people recover their
life because no one really knows what exactly put that homeless person on the
street in the first place.
Solutions
Throughout the years, America has tried to take control
of the poverty epidemic in various ways. Though, not all of them have worked
and this is why we were still battling this problem today. Provided below is an
idea of what will finally pull us out of this long-lasting epidemic and there
are multiple factors that go into it including the creation of more jobs,
affordable childcare and early education and paid sick leave.
The first thing we need to do as a country to pull
ourselves out of poverty is create more jobs that are attainable by those who
have a lower education but that pay enough for a livable salary, at about
$54,000 for a single parent and child in Galveston County (“Family Budget Calculator”).
This would employ many of the people who are on the streets today by helping
them find a job that is within their educational reach. The problem with many
of the lower education jobs, is that they pay minimum wage and are mostly taken
by high school students working part time. We need to create jobs that are set
aside for those who may have never been able to finish school for certain
reasons, so they are able to make enough money to live an acceptable lifestyle
as opposed to being forced on the streets. This would positively affect the
“56% of poverty ridden female householders with related children under 18 who
do not even have a high school diploma” (“Poverty Rates by Household Type and
Education Level, 2008”). By creating these jobs, we could use them to our
advantage by renovating abandoned houses, revitalizing neighborhoods,
rebuilding our infrastructure and many other jobs that would not only help
those employed but also improve the surrounding areas (Vallas and
Boteach).
Another way we could pull America out of poverty is by
investing in affordable, high-quality child care and early education. This
would make a huge difference to those families in poverty who have small
children by allowing them to afford to send their children to daycare during
the day so they can work and earn an income. “On average, poor families who pay out of pocket for child
care spend one-third of their incomes just to be able
to work” which is why they are unable to pull themselves out of poverty no
matter how much they work (Vallas and Boteach).
Quality childcare these days can
cost “more than one year of tuition at most states’
four-year public colleges” reaching anywhere between $20,000-$34,000 while the
average income for a family in poverty is only around $50,000 (1). By providing
affordable childcare, we will allow poverty ridden families to send their
children to day care without worrying that it is costing them more than half of
their income. This will let them work full time while being able to spend their
paycheck on more than just childcare.
The
last way America could raise itself out of poverty is by creating paid leave
and sick days. America is the only developed country in the world that does not
have paid medical and sick leave, making it quite difficult for families to
choose between the health of themselves or their family and their needed
income. “Paid leave is an important anti-poverty policy, as having a child is
one of the leading causes of economic hardship” (Vallas and
Boteach). Many times, not having paid sick leave harshly affects the women in
society because they are usually the main caregivers to their children, so when
their children are sick, they have to forgo their pay for that day. These days
can quickly add up into a whole week’s salary that someone will not be
receiving because they need to care for their child. Many people living in
poverty will work low wage jobs to begin with which are the jobs that most
commonly do not provide paid sick leave with a “shocking 86% of employees in
the food service industry” not having paid sick days (Farrell). By providing
paid leave and sick days, we will take the burden off of Americans who are
forced to choose between the health of themselves or their children and their
paycheck.
Camus And Absurdity
Albert
Camus, a French philosopher and author, contributed his philosophy of absurdism
to society through his poems and stories such as The Stranger and The Plague.
He believed that absurdism stemmed from the idea that humans are constantly
trying to find meaning in a meaningless world. Camus’ beliefs do relate to
American poverty because people believe that money is what will either bring
them happiness or despair when in reality it is just a piece of paper we have
assigned meaning to. Camus said that money is “a kind of spiritual
snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without” it (“Albert
Camus Quotes About Money | A-Z Quotes). Camus would feel like money and poverty is
absurd because so many people kill themselves day in and day out to receive a
paycheck just so they can eat, while the government is doing very little to
help. Camus’ vision of absurdism matches with poverty because society puts so
much meaning and worth into money that we forget about doing things that make
us happy. It is absurd that we allow a piece of paper to make or break our
world.
Conclusion
Poverty is slowly
taking over the American Society with approximately 16.4 million American
children going through their childhood in impoverishment (Fay). No matter how
much we have tried to rid our country of poverty, it seems to always infest
some parts of our nation. Even though poverty might seem minimal and
insignificant to some, it is a real problem we have to face today that needs
some attention. Our society will always be vulnerable to destitution, but it is
the citizens’ job to care for one another and fight for rights for people who
might not be as fortunate as others. We as a nation are stronger than poverty,
and it is time to take control of it.
Works Cited
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