The Working Poor Read Online Free Page A

rate from 15.2 to 16 percent. 12 Such a change would presumably make more families eligible for benefits that are linked to the poverty level; some programs, including children’s health insurance, already cover households with incomes up to 150 or 200 percent of the poverty threshold, depending on the state.
    Even if revised methods of figuring poverty were adopted, however, they would provide only a still photograph of a family’s momentary situation. In that snapshot, the ebb and flow of the moving picture is lost. By measuring only income and expenses during a current year and not assets and debts, the formulas ignore the past, and the past is frequently an overwhelming burden on the present. Plenty of people have moved into jobs that put them above the threshold of poverty, only to discover that their student loans, their car payments, and the exorbitant interest charged on old credit card balances consume so much of their cash that they live no better than before.
    When the poor or the nearly poor are asked to define poverty, however, they talk not only about what’s in the wallet but what’s in the mind or the heart. “Hopelessness,” said a fifteen-year-old girl in New Hampshire.
    “Not hopelessness—helplessness,” said a man in Los Angeles. “Why should I get up? Nobody’s gonna ever hire me because look at the way I’m dressed, and look at the fact that I never finished high school, look at the fact that I’m black, I’m brown, I’m yellow, or I grew up in the trailer.”
    “The state of mind,” said a man in Washington, D.C. “I believe that spirituality is way more important than physical.”
    “I am so rich,” said a woman whose new job running Xerox machines was lifting her out of poverty, “because—not only material things—because I know who I am, I know where I’m going now.”
    Another woman, who fell into poverty after growing up middle class, celebrated her “cultural capital,” which meant her love of books, music, ideas, and her close relationships with her children. “In some senses, we are not at all poor; we have a great richness,” she said. “We don’t feel very poor. We feel poor when we can’t go to the doctor or fix the car.”
    For practically every family, then, the ingredients of poverty are part financial and part psychological, part personal and part societal, part past and part present. Every problem magnifies the impact of the others, and all are so tightly interlocked that one reversal can produce a chain reaction with results far distant from the original cause. A run-down apartment can exacerbate a child’s asthma, which leads to a call for an ambulance, which generates a medical bill that cannot be paid, which ruins a credit record, which hikes the interest rate on an auto loan, which forces the purchase of an unreliable used car, which jeopardizes a mother’s punctuality at work, which limits her promotions and earning capacity, which confines her to poor housing. You will meet such a woman in Chapter One. If she or any other impoverished working parent added up all of her individual problems, the whole would be equal to more than the sum of its parts.
    Consequently, most issues confronting the working poor are laced into most chapters of this book, even while each chapter throws a spotlight on one or another element of deprivation. In the chapter on work you will find stories of parenting; in the discussion of health you will see the matter of housing. Isolating the individual problems, as a laboratory would extract specific toxins, would be artificial and pointless. They exist largely because of one another, and the chemical reaction among them worsens the overall effect.
    If problems are interlocking, then so must solutions be. A job alone is not enough. Medical insurance alone is not enough. Good housing alone is not enough. Reliable transportation, careful family budgeting, effective parenting, effective schooling are not enough when each is