Poverty in America
Chuying Liang
02/21/2015
According to U.S. Census Statistics on American Households, the Nation’s official
poverty rate in 2012 was 15.0 percent, which represents 46.5 million people living at or
below the poverty line. President John F. Kenny said: “If a free society cannot help the
many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” Helping the poor in the United
State is not absolutely considered as an issue. Instead, Poverty has been a debatable topic.
Some are convinced that individual accounts for destiny. There is a positivism that nothing
is impossible within US frontier. If one is diligent enough and work hard, he will get out
of poverty and achieve his success ultimately. Some believe that poverty is no longer a
problem because the poor are not what they used to be. Fox News has released a bunch of
arguments that, to some extent, with the help of government and private assistance, the
living condition for the poor is way better. Hence, it is not worth using a good deal of
resources to get people out of “poverty”. My opinion is that poverty is neither only
decided by individual nor that poor people do not deserve our help anymore. Rather,
poverty is the product of social inequality. The causes of poverty are intricate.
Overlooking the physical and psychological abuse caused by poverty will marginalize
poor population and further harms social stability.
Perter Edelman, a professor of law at Georgetown University and the author, in his
article Poverty in America: Why Can’t We End It, comments that there are main four reasons
for poverty: “low-wages jobs; the increasing number of single parents; the near shutoff of
welfare such as cash assistance; and discrimination of race (minorities) and gender (single
mothers). Further, Edelman retrieves related data from Census Bureau, “104 million people
— a third of the population — have annual incomes below twice the poverty line, less than
$38,000 for a family of three.” Edelman presents us the specific and direct causes of poverty-
employment. Job is a crucial element in fighting against poverty. Most of the time, the
majority of poor are looking for a job but anxious because they know jobs means food,
housing, clothes and medical treatment. However, due to the economic recession, they can
only occupy groundwork and get less paid.
What’s more, the increasing number of single parents in recent years complicates the
low-wages problem because single parents can’t afford their family after the half cut-off of
their household income. When a family splits up, the household income will reduce by half,
but the living costs will increase by half. In addition to Peter Edelman, there are many
scholars think that divorce is one of the biggest reasons for poverty. In article Assessing work
and marriage as Routes out of Poverty, Katrina Running and Louise Marie Roth indicate:
“over the past decade the poverty rate among single female-headed households rose from
25.4% in 2000 to 31.6% in 2010, according to U.S. Department of Commerce” (177). Not
only women, but also the children who live with their single mother with ill job-skills and
education, are almost doomed to become a “poor” generation. Single parents can’t afford
their children for education, and some of them are not even aware of the importance of
education because they don’t necessarily benefit from education. Therefore, it is hard for
their children to break out the vicious circle of poverty. Hence, many policy makers
emphasize the accumulation of household income brought by marriage and consider it as a
way out of poverty.
Employment, marriage, discrimination are some persistent socioeconomic problems.
There is a prevalent argument that health cost causes poverty. Even though we resist blaming
the causes of poverty on cancer, kidney stone, ect, we must acknowledge the directly inner
relationship between health and poverty especially for those who have no health insurance.
Through analyzing different types of cases resorting to charity organizations, F. N. Stapleford
who works for General Secretary, Neighborhood Worker’s Asscociation, concludes:
“sickness is the largest and most important of the handicaps which force families below the
poverty line” (158). Illness might turn out to be the most devastating disability contributing to
unemployment. Kathryn Stother Ratcliff, an assistant professor of sociology and associate
head, also agrees that poverty determines the poor can only eat cheap but poor-quality food,
limits the poor’s access to see a doctor, which all imposes threaten to their health. In his
article The Power of Poverty, he indicates that poor health is a direct cause of poverty. Illness
and injury can impose a great deal of expense upon families including surgery and medical
treatment, etc. He reports that a national random sample survey found that 62.1% of all
bankruptcies were caused by medical expense (Himmelstein, Thorne, Warren& Woolhander,
2009). Individual has to bear all the heath costs if he/she doesn’t have health insurance.
However, the health care usually is accompanied by a decent job. The dead knot here is poor
health always limits people’s chances and competitiveness to get a job. Without being at
work, those people has no preparation for any potential diseases. This is another systematic
vicious cycle that traps the poor. It seems to them they must have a job before they have a job.
Further, Ratcliff shifts the direction indicating: “poverty causes poor health” (7). The
unhealthy condition caused by poverty is destructive. First, poverty is in relation to various
social determinants including housing, neighborhoods and air pollution that can cause direct
impact on health. To illustrate, the poor can only afford housing locating in bad and polluted
environment. The neighbors are the poor people who can only resort to illegal drug deals for
earning money and to violence for self-preservation. In addition, the poor have no extra
money spending in equipping the house with safety protections such as fire alarm. All this
negative activities can threaten people’s health. Moreover, poverty limits the access to health
insurance as a result of low employment rate. And due to the ill-education require caused by
poverty, most of the time the poor are only exposed to the poor-quality health care.
Poverty not only damages body, but also hurts brain. The psychological impact is
invisible and long-term. Paul Krugman, an Op-Ed Columinst in New York Times, in his
article Poverty is Poison, illustrates that poverty poisons children’s brain in their earlier stage
by influencing their language skills and memory, thus impairs children’s ability to break out
of poverty. Daniel H. Lende, who earns Ph.D in Anthropology of Emory University,
critically examines the concept of “poverty poisons the brain.” In the first half of the research,
He uses “multifactorial etiology and a nested model of causation” (184) to illustrate how
poverty indeed hurts brain. Specifically, socioeconomic status determines the mediators such
as prenatal factors, parental care, cognitive simulation or other factors. The mediators further
influence the development of the brain, and thus influence children’s cognition, academic
achievement and mental health (184). In the second part, Lende points out: “Referencing the
brain as the central mediator of poverty hides the larger truths of inequality and distorts our
understanding of what poverty really is” (198). Basically, he is saying the concept “poverty
poisons brain” overlooks the reality that brains might function socially and unconsciously
reinforces the sense of “poverty” into the brain itself. However, it is not the poor who decide
what they should expose to. We can’t control how the brain function, but we can decide how
to prove the entire condition.
As we can see, there are a variety of causes for poverty as well as a variety of impacts
causing by poverty. Those direct and negative impacts are the best reasons for us to care the
poor population. In article Preventing Poverty. Ron Smith says: “Poverty is then, partly a
health problem, partly an economic problem and partly a problem of education” (6). The poor
are victims of the problematic aspects of the society. We can’t expect them to break out
poverty by themselves because they already stuck in the vicious cycle. Governments,
individuals, private and non-profit organizations all play a role in improving the whole social
condition and dragging them from the mire of poverty.
Work Cited
Edelman, Peter. "Poverty in America: Why Can’t We End It?" New York Times N.p., 28
July 2012. Web. 21 Feb. 2015.
Himmelstein, D. U., Thorne, D., Warren, J. D., & Woolhander, S. (2009). Medical
bankruptcy in the United States, 2007: Results of a national study. American Journal
of Medicine, 122(8), 741-746.
Krugman, Paul. “Poverty is Poison.” New York Times N.p., February 18. Web. 21 Feb. 2015.
Lende, Daniel H. "Poverty Poisons The Brain." Annals Of Anthropological Practice 36.1
(2012): 183-201. Academic Search Complete. Web. 23 Feb. 2015.
"Poverty In The United States." Congressional Digest 92.9 (2013): 12-13. Academic Search
Complete. Web. 21 Feb. 2015.
Ratcliff Kathryn Strother. “The Power of Poverty: Individual Agency and Structural
Constraints.” Poverty and Health: A Crisis Among America's Most Vulnerable. ABCCLIO, 2013. 5-30. Google Ebooks Web. 22 Feb. 2015
Running, Katrina, and Louise Marie Roth. "To Wed Or To Work? Assessing Work And
Marriage As Routes Out Of Poverty." Journal Of Poverty 17.2 (2013): 177197. Education Research Complete. Web. 22 Feb. 2015.
StaplefordC, F.N. "Causes of Poverty." The Public Health Journal 10.4 (1919): 157-61. Web.
21 Feb. 2015.
Smith, Ron. "Preventing Poverty." Policy & Practice (19426828) 71.4 (2013): 6-38.
Academic Search Complete. Web. 23 Feb. 2015.