Poverty In America
Poverty in America
In America some of the nation's most destitute, the working poor lacking skills for new jobs, receive little government support. The working poor are by some measures the most overlooked and hardworking Americans. Often lacking in skills, they have lost jobs to new technology and low-cost labor abroad. When compared to the highly concentrated and visible urban poor, they receive little political, popular, or bureaucratic support. The statistics from the US Census Bureau indicate that 31 million Americans live in households where there is either a risk of hunger or outright hunger. Those who may be going hungry include children in those poor households and the elderly who sometimes have to choose between using their fixed incomes for medicine or food.
There is poverty in America, but hunger is a distinct problem, which of course is a part of poverty. People who want to eat in America can use food stamps, find soup kitchens, attend lunch programs. But with 13.8 percent of Americans living in poverty, according to the most recent census numbers, the idea that some people may face hunger in America is not easily dismissed. In fact, 84 percent of those who live below the poverty line say their families have enough food. Only 13 percent say they need food. But 3 percent of Americans who are poor say they are hungry.
So far, no one has found an effective universal approach to poverty that fits comfortably within the social insurance system. The factors that work so well with social insurance do not apply to poverty. Poor people do not constitute an easily mobilized and militant constituency. Further, poverty simply does not lend itself to a social insurance approach. Even if one conceived of a payroll tax against the general contingency of becoming poor (as with social security),
nonworking poor people could not participate in paying for their benefits, and the insurance principle would be...
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