Fri, 10 Jan 2014

48 Million People In USA Are Living In Poverty


For a nation perceived to be the richest and the most powerful in the world, it is always difficult to grasp why still 48 Million People In USA Are Living In Poverty.

Ironically, The US is clawing back to economic recovery marked by a robust stock market in recent months but it seems the positive signs are not trickling down on the general population. So the painful question remains: Why still 48 million people in the USA are living in poverty?

There Are Four Reasons:


An Incredible Number Of People Still Work At Low-Wage Jobs


It is a fact that most the income of the poor comes from wages. According to statistics from the Census Bureau, about one-third of the population or 104 million people, have annual incomes twice below the $38,000 poverty threshold for a family of three.

Firstly, what we need to do to get people out of poverty is to create more jobs that pay decent wages. But the current state of the US economy cannot provide for the creation of higher paying jobs than what is available or most of the population. We've been mired with the problem of low-income wages for the past 40 years.

The US government should have the urgency by now to push for bigger investments in education, skill development programs and full-employment policies that should stretch far beyond the current crisis if we hope to curb the poverty crisis for the next five years.


The Steady Increase Of Households Headed By A Single Parent


More and more homes in America are now headed by a single parent, creating a big hole for income opportunities compared to families with an extra adult who shares with the brunt of earning for the family's upkeep. Data shows that families headed by a single mother has poverty incidence exceeding a staggering 40 percent.

This reflects the social spectrum of the poverty issue in the United States and to aggravate matters as to why still 48 Million People In USA Are Living In Poverty, government safety nets to help single parents are fading fast during the past 20 years.


Welfare Programs For Low-Income Families Are Fast Disappearing

The government welfare program otherwise called TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) is steadily on the decline for the past ten years that exacerbated the state of extreme poverty in the United States. The number of poor families receiving welfare was down to about 27 percent over the past fifteen years compared to the mid 1990's when more than two-thirds of the poor families received welfare from the government.


Persistent Issues Of Gender And Race

High poverty rate among minorities and household headed by single mothers reflects the persistent racial and gender problems plaguing the US today. One way of explaining poverty in the US, social scientists agree, is the "blame the victim" concept. This contends that the flaw lies within the poor people themselves, not with the society or the system of government they happen to belong.

One underlying aspect of this theory that has quite become unpopular in recent years is that poor people are genetically inferior to rich people. A case in point is the assertion of the controversial book The Bell Curve by Richard Hernstein And Charles Murray that the cause of high poverty rates among African-Americans is their inherent genetic deficiency in intelligence.



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