Showing results for "Homelessness in America" in Money & Finance

Nearly 40 million people in the United States live below the poverty line - about $26,200 for a family of four. Low-income families and individuals are everywhere, from cities to rural communities. While poverty is commonly seen as a personal failure, or a deficiency of character or knowledge, it's actually the result of bad policy. Public policy has purposefully erected barriers that deny access to basic needs, creating a society where people can easily become trapped - not because we lack the resources to lift them out, but because we are actively choosing not to.

There are, in the United States, a significant and growing number of families who live on less than $2.00 per person, per day. That figure, the World Bank measure of poverty, is hard to imagine in this country - most of us spend more than that before we get to work or school in the morning.

Since the early days of the American republic, political thinkers have maintained that a grossly unequal division of property, wealth, and power would lead to the erosion of democratic life. Yet over the past thirty-five years, neoconservatives and neoliberals alike have redrawn the tenets of American liberalism. Nowhere is this more evident than in our current mainstream political discourse, in which the politics of economic inequality are rarely discussed.

In this Very Short Introduction, Philip N. Jefferson explores how the answers to these questions lie in the social, political, economic, educational, and technological processes that impact all of us throughout our lives. The degree of vulnerability is all that differentiates us. He shows how a person's level of vulnerability to adverse changes in their life is very much dependent on the circumstances of their birth, including where their family lived, whether it was peacetime or wartime, whether they had access to clean water, and whether they are male or female.