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Back to Subjects - Economics

poverty in the US

poverty in the US Many people here in the US or abroad, are forced to live a life in poverty. There are many various types of poverty that exist with several causes. The people who live in poverty are different from the people that don’t. These people face many social, physical, and mental challenges that impacts themselves and their societies. Many measures have been taken to attack and thus limit the spread of poverty and or decrease the amount that exists. Poverty affects all aspects of life on an individual. There are many different types of poverty that exist. The first type of poverty is lack of material well-being. In our society you might be considered poor if you made around $20,000 a year, lived in a small house, drove an old, used piece of junk and so on. In other societies you are doing well as long as you can provide the materials needed to survive everyday, which are food, water, shelter and clothing. As long as you have these four things you can survive. The problem with some poor people is that they don’t have these things. That is why it is hard for them to survive. It is very important that people have material well-being in order to stay away from poverty. Basic materials are probably the most important thing needed for survival and also to prevent poverty. Another type of poverty is lack of physical well-being. Physical well-being deals with health, strength, and appearance. Without these things, the poor man is screwed since the body is the only means of making money and surviving. These people are living on a day to day basis. Each day they have to struggle to get money, which is what gets people the basic materials needed to survive. Because they are living day by day, people in poverty have no chance to improve their status. “Poor people cannot improve their status because they live day by day, and if they get sick then they are in trouble because they have to borrow money and pay interest.” This is very true, and it also happens a lot because hungry people tend to get sick more easily and for longer periods of time than people that are not hungry. Once a man losses his health, he loses everything else needed for survival. Another type of poverty is lack of security. Security, is surviving without worrying about crime, wars between different groups or gangs, lack of police protection, natural disasters, and changes in climate. People just can’t live in a state of constant fear. This isn’t as big a problem here in the United States as it is in other parts of the world but the problem is still here, mostly in inner cities. Security is up to the people living in poverty themselves to take care of. Unlike lack of materials and physical well-being, the poor people themselves can stop committing crimes so that people could live in peace. Peace is a very important factor to people living in poverty. There are several causes for poverty here in the United States. Some reasons are, as explained above, lack of material well-being, physical well-being, and security. Those are three large reasons, but not the biggest reason would have to be just lack of money. There are only so many well paying jobs out there. This leaves the people who don’t get these jobs to get worse jobs, and some people to get minimum wage jobs. the point of having a minimum wage is to make sure that every working person will earn the minimum amount of money that is needed to survive without any savings. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, the hourly wage necessary to afford the average two bedroom apartment is $12. Even if you got a much cheaper apartment, a family with kids would obviously need to make more than the minimum wage is now and closer to what the National Low Income Housing Coalition calculated is necessary, which, again, is $12. This is over $6 what the minimum wage is now, which is more than twice as much. Money is obviously the most important thing needed to stay out of poverty so it would be safe to say that if people made more money, there would be less When people think of poverty they usually think of starving people in countries like Somalia and Ethiopia. Well, there are starving people here in the US as well. Poverty is just measured a little different here. Poverty is determined by comparing pretax cash income with the poverty thresholds. These thresholds are updated each year by the Census Bureau to determine who and how many people are in poverty. The people that are in poverty come in many races, ages, and sexes in all different regions. Different races have very different poverty levels. Minorities brought the US “A failure to address the health needs of the country’s minorities and poor caused the United States to miss a top 10 mother’s rank around the world” (Save the Children On average, blacks and Hispanics have poverty much higher lower than whites do and that is why they brought our country down in this category. Blacks have levels at 28.8%, Hispanics have levels at 21.2%, while whites are at only 13.2%. This is only an average but the more color you have the higher poverty levels there are. Age is a fairly big factor on the average poverty levels in America. Children under 18 are at 18.9% while the elderly are at only a surprising 10.5%. Social Security might play a little role in that figure. Middle aged people have poverty levels just over the elderly. So, on average, the older you are, the lower poverty levels you have. This might be because when old people live in poverty they die but, nonetheless, old people live in lower poverty levels than young people. Sex also plays a major role in the poverty level scales in America. Families headed by females had a poverty level all the way up at 38.7% while families headed by males had level at only 8.5%. As you can see by the great differences in these two percentages, families headed by a male are much less likely to by in poverty than families headed by a Location also plays a major role in the poverty level scales in America. Poverty levels in the central city are at 18.5% and outside the city poverty levels are at 14.4%. These percentages are so close together because rural areas bring the second number up. People who live in rural areas don’t make much more money than the people in the inner cities do. Most people don’t know this but it is true. the people from the suburbs have to bring the poverty levels down for the people outside the city category. All in all, the poverty rates in America have gone from 13.3% in 1999 to 12.7% in 2000. This is a great difference and hopefully the number will keep on decreasing so there will be less poverty in the united States. Right now the number is 34.5 million people in poverty, so it will be hard to eliminate poverty completely, especially when you take into consideration the fact that the number of people in emergency shelters in New York City has gone from 1000 families in 1980, to 10,000 families in the year 2000. Hopefully we can get that number back closer to 1000 families. There are many challenges faced by poor people. The biggest challenges are to survive and to do so by staying healthy, maintaining a job and basic materials, and to avoid insecure places. Other challenges they face are to put theirs lives back together so that they can get out of poverty and move on. This will also save them some humiliation Many measures have to be taken to attack and thus limit the spread of poverty. One major one is that the minimum wage, as mentioned before, should be raised from below $6 an hour to as close to $12 an hour as possible because $12 is the amount that the NLIHC came up with as the lowest amount that you could live on in the average 2 bedroom apartment in the United States. Another measure that should be taken to end poverty in the United States is to make the streets safer. This could be done by hiring more cops and fireman, making more hospitals, and making stricter violence laws. With all of these combined America should go way down on the poverty scales. Many people live in poverty, not just in America, but across the world. This is a horrible thing because poor people live very hard lives. It is a constant every day struggle for them just to survive and if anything goes wrong they could lose any hope of coming out of poverty. It is important that the world does its best to overcome all poverty to make the world a better place. Bibliography:

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