Nickel and Dimed Book Report
26 April 2010
Nickel and Dimed – Book Report
America encourages the value of self-reliance to achieving one’s goals and dreams. There is a common belief that poverty can be defeated with hard work and that the poor are simply too lazy to earn a better living. The idea of self-sufficiency is the cause of controversy for welfare programs. Poor single mothers were looked down upon for having the option to be unemployed and living solely off welfare. When President Clinton’s 1996 Welfare Reform was established, people were taken out of the program and were forced into the working world. Less taxpayer money was taken out of the upper middle classes’ income, and the poor were responsible for their own living. While this may sound ideal, most low-income people are actually unable to provide for themselves in their living conditions. With a full-time minimum wage job, they can work as hard as possible and still be stuck in debt and poverty. Their low-income prevents them from improving their lives and affording basic needs such as nutrition, health care, education, and shelter. The working poor face difficulties not through their own faults but rather because of how our society functions, where wealth is gradually becoming unevenly distributed. Unfortunately, many people are unbeknownst to the stagnant and worsening living conditions when working for minimum-wage pay. In the book Nickel and
Dimed author Barbara Ehrenreich discovers the hardships of being poor when she temporarily leaves her journalistic career to work low-wage paying jobs. Barbara’s expedition came about through a curiosity of how millions of women could maintain a living in the labor force after the 1996 Welfare Reform. She was already aware that a single mother without welfare would need “an hourly wage of $8.89 to afford a one-bedroom apartment” (pg. 3). Instead of hearing others’ stories, she decides to experience herself the difficulties faced by these poverty-stricken people by going out
Nickel and Dimed – Book Report
America encourages the value of self-reliance to achieving one’s goals and dreams. There is a common belief that poverty can be defeated with hard work and that the poor are simply too lazy to earn a better living. The idea of self-sufficiency is the cause of controversy for welfare programs. Poor single mothers were looked down upon for having the option to be unemployed and living solely off welfare. When President Clinton’s 1996 Welfare Reform was established, people were taken out of the program and were forced into the working world. Less taxpayer money was taken out of the upper middle classes’ income, and the poor were responsible for their own living. While this may sound ideal, most low-income people are actually unable to provide for themselves in their living conditions. With a full-time minimum wage job, they can work as hard as possible and still be stuck in debt and poverty. Their low-income prevents them from improving their lives and affording basic needs such as nutrition, health care, education, and shelter. The working poor face difficulties not through their own faults but rather because of how our society functions, where wealth is gradually becoming unevenly distributed. Unfortunately, many people are unbeknownst to the stagnant and worsening living conditions when working for minimum-wage pay. In the book Nickel and
Dimed author Barbara Ehrenreich discovers the hardships of being poor when she temporarily leaves her journalistic career to work low-wage paying jobs. Barbara’s expedition came about through a curiosity of how millions of women could maintain a living in the labor force after the 1996 Welfare Reform. She was already aware that a single mother without welfare would need “an hourly wage of $8.89 to afford a one-bedroom apartment” (pg. 3). Instead of hearing others’ stories, she decides to experience herself the difficulties faced by these poverty-stricken people by going out