Free The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives by Sasha Abramsky Page A

dollars from the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act flowed to Flint, 1,100 teenagers were provided with summer employment; in 2012, by contrast, with federal funds having dried up and with state cuts having kicked in, summer jobs for at-risk teens were all but eliminated. “In Flint, the murder capital of the world,” Booker caustically stated, “giving 1,100 kids employment makes a difference.” 16 She continued: “One of the things the TANF community in our area needs is literacy.” But because GED training wasn’t considered to count toward hours worked, there was no incentive built in for the recipients of this aid to get more education. “What they need the most is considered non-core, nonessential. And so the cycle repeats.”
    Increasingly, the poorest of the poor have found that they cannot access educational programs, or they have discovered that in pursuing education and not working the required number of hours to qualify for TANF they are excluding themselves from access to the cash economy.
    RUNNING UPHILL
    This is not merely a kink in the system, but a fundamental flaw in the design of the modern-day American safety net. Caught at the intersection of politics and economic malfunction, millions of American families are now almost totally excluded from the cash economy.For many of them, simply getting up to the poverty line is an impossibility; they live in what the government terms “deep poverty,” accessing cash and cash-equivalent benefits that don’t even bring them up to half of the poverty threshold. Nearly 3 million children now live in households in which each person has less than $2 per day to spend. 17
    As Jessica Bartholow of the Western Center on Law and Poverty puts it, this is a grievous state of affairs. “Below 50 percent of the poverty line, we’re putting kids in extreme danger—they’re going to the hospital more often, missing school, missing opportunity at a great rate.” At that level of poverty, the basic realities of daily life become so difficult to navigate that people end up facing not just temporary hardships but permanent handicaps. They are more susceptible to life-threatening food-borne diseases such as cysticercosis, and, because of the poor housing and sanitary conditions that they face, are more likely to become infected by, and to have to live with, insect-borne sicknesses such as dengue fever and Chagas disease. 18 Exposed to deep poverty as a child, a person is likely to grow into adulthood burdened with poor health, lower life expectancy than their wealthier peers, inadequate education, possibly low self-esteem. For people born and raised in deep poverty, the playing field has not been leveled; they are, quite simply, left to run uphill throughout their often-truncated lives.
    It’s the opposite of a virtuous circle. Witness, for example, the trajectory described by community organizer Gloria Dickerson, who had returned to her hometown of Drew from the state capital of Jackson to work with impoverished residents on bettering their lives. The Mississippi Delta town that she worked in, said Dickerson, looked like
    neighborhoods with a lot of blight; people who are feeling hopeless; people stuck in their place; a place where the educational levels are very low because the schools are not performing well. The infrastructure is deteriorating—the roads: potholes. People want to dobetter, but people feel like they don’t have a way out. They find ways to accept the way they live. They’re stressed, because of a lack of money to pay the utility bills, water bills, put food on the table. A lot are dependent on low-income housing, food stamps. It looks like children who are probably more hopeful than the adults, but they’re looking for someone to help them succeed. They want good schools; they want to be able to be successful.
    In Drew, half of the kids didn’t graduate high school—and the schools themselves had been taken over by the state. “There are no