I was born and raised in a small town on the U.S. / Mexico border. Although I was gifted a privileged life, I witnessed many families endure severe hardship and lived on almost nothing. For this reason, I was moved by the book “$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America” by Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer.
The premise of the book is about a mostly unidentified segment of the poorest of the poor in the U.S. living on less than $2 a day. These are individuals, primarily women with children who earn very little money and do not have any other income source and any form of government assistance. The book graphically details the sacrifices these people endure and the resourcefulness they can muster to try to survive. There is the mother bouncing her daughter from one shelter to another while she desperately searches for a low-paying job; a woman with severe health issues with two children loses her job and moves to Texas only to have her daughter molested by a relative with a drinking problem.
One of the more compelling arguments of the book is creating a new class of poor in America. They struggle to survive on barely anything because they do not qualify for government aid, or the assistance they receive is insufficient to supplement their low-paying job. The authors argue that the transformation of the safety net for those in need falls short in lifting people out of poverty and shows that more people have sunk into poverty. The 1996 welfare reform resulted in the abandonment of a fifty-five-year-old program that helped families with children by providing them with cash assistance. A program replaced the original cash-assistance program known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). This program creates more constraints for those in need than helping with lifetime limits on the amount of aid they can receive. Also, the program instituted work requirements for recipients creating another layer of complexity in the struggle to manage time in a low-paying job and their families. The authors speculate creating a new bottom layer in a society filled with plasma donors, sugar daddies, and children living in horrific circumstances.
At the peak of the original welfare program before 1996, fourteen million Americans received aid; by 2015, the number of Americans receiving assistance dwindled to less than four million. Advocates of TAFN may argue the program is working, and more people are off welfare and can sustain themselves. It’s difficult to imagine that ten million people were able to escape poverty in one decade. Edin and Shaefer argue that the drop in families receiving aid has more to do with bureaucratic red tape and complex eligibility criteria in receiving government aid. The book illustrates the level of discouragement as Susan Brown, and others prefer not to bother applying for assistance to avoid the frustration of being turned down again.
The book relies heavily on the experiences of many of the people affected by poverty and living on almost nothing to highlight the problem of extreme poverty. Furthermore, the authors reference the theoretical aspect of Ellwood’s welfare reform’s true intention against the actual implementation as the reason for the ineffectiveness. I would argue that the sole concept of welfare reform brought about by Ellwood’s strategy is the cause why more American families live in poverty. The book points on page 7, before the 1996 welfare reform, fewer families were living on $2 a day than today. Imperial evidence shows that in 2015 45M people lived below the poverty rate, compared to 37M before welfare reform.
While Edin and Shaefer provide a fascinating depiction of the lives of the poorest of the poor, the book fails to analyze the root causes of extreme poverty. Government assistance is one component, but the structure in which Americans live every day is fractured. Racism and inequality are at the heart of the problem of poverty. Expecting the more marginalized Americans to have the grit to overcome an uneven playing field is unrealistic, further exasperated by an ideology that stigmatizes those in need.
The stories of the families in the book are compelling, and at the same time, inspirational in the ease they carry on with their lives. These are people who live in a cashless economy, struggling to survive in a shadow society that serves as an indictment of the welfare reform created by the Clinton administration. I read the book thinking of the people I remember when I was growing up and wondering where they are today. I suspect their lives are no different today, and as Edin and Shaefer conclude that there is much work that remains in helping the most vulnerable.
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