I have often heard friends say "we are poor". I am quietly disgusted. My eyes glaze over and my heart breaks a little.
I URGE every single person who considers themselves to be poor to pull a Morgan Spurlock, and go 30 days on a welfare or minimum wage budget. For the purposes of this article, I am using data reflecting my own household of one adult and one child.
Agencies in the US quantify poverty differently, for different purposes.
US Census establishes poverty at $43 dollars per day:
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| 2012 chart |
“The guidelines are a simplification of the poverty thresholds for use for administrative purposes — for instance, determining financial eligibility for certain federal programs.”
Department of Human Services establishes poverty at $41.50 per day.
The UN and World Bank have set a global standard of absolute poverty at around $15.15 dollars a day single, $17.43 for my family (around $1.08 international dollars a day). When you think of abject poverty, do you have visions of the Christian Children's Fund? "For the price of a cup of coffee..." Poverty like that only happens in other countries right?
Although US Census and DHS establish poverty, they do not represent the dollar amount of funding dismemberment to welfare recipients. US Welfare (TANF) provides $12.50/day (including food stamps, less than $25/ day).
For the extremely lucky, those who were in the process of applying for housing before 2002, you might also have subsidized housing or section 8 vouchers. But alas, there has been no effective housing allowance available for anyone in at least the last decade.
There are some shelter-to-work programs, and HUD loans for people who can afford it, but really they cater to families who need need less help, those who are at or below the DHS poverty line have little recourse but to share housing- which is nearly impossible due to some new requirements of income needed to qualify for rentals~ despite Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights regarding housing and quality of living:
"Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control."Poverty, Wikipedia:
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United Nations: Fundamentally, poverty is a denial of choices and opportunities, a violation of human dignity. It means lack of basic capacity to participate effectively in society. It means not having enough to feed and clothe a family, not having a school or clinic to go to, not having the land on which to grow one’s food or a job to earn one’s living, not having access to credit. It means insecurity, powerlessness and exclusion of individuals, households and communities. It means susceptibility to violence, and it often implies living in marginal or fragile environments, without access to clean water or sanitation
Copenhagen Declaration: Absolute poverty is a condition characterized by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information. It depends not only on income but also on access to social services
Absolute poverty or destitution refers to the deprivation of basic human needs, which commonly includes food, water, sanitation, clothing, shelter, health care and education.
Relative poverty views poverty as socially defined and dependent on social context, hence relative poverty is a measure of income inequality. Usually, relative poverty is measured as the percentage of population with income less than some fixed proportion of median income. The measurements are usually based on a person's yearly income and frequently take no account of total wealth
Each nation has its own threshold for absolute poverty line; in the United States, for example, the absolute poverty line was US$15.15 per day in 2010 (US$22,000 per year for a family of four)
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I adapted this chart to better explain absolute, and abject poverty. The orange box represents the percentage of Americans who live in absolute poverty. My daughter and I fall in the orange bracket. The red bracket represents relative poverty, such as those who are living on a single minimum wage income, or those whose social security is their only income.
Maybe you are not actually poor. In fact, it's much more likely that you are NOT poor, even by US standards. Relative poverty in the US is like bistro math. Compared to the top 5% of earners in the US, everyone is relatively poor. I suggest that when you make your personal assessment you compare your income to the bottom one percent, rather than the top.
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About 25,000 people die every day of hunger or hunger-related causes, according to the United Nations. This is one person every three and a half seconds, as you can see on this display. Unfortunately, it is children who die most often.
http://www.poverty.com/#
Poor Us: An Animated History of Poverty:
Street children are primary victims of exclusion. The United Nations estimate their number to be around 100 million.
http://portal.unesco.org/education/en/ev.php-URL_ID=32968&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
20 Facts About U.S. Inequality that Everyone Should Know: charts
http://www.stanford.edu/group/scspi/cgi-bin/facts.php
The Invention of Capitalism: How a Self-Sufficient Peasantry was Whipped Into Industrial Wage Slaves
http://www.filmsforaction.org/news/recovered_economic_history_everyone_but_an_idiot_knows_that_the_lower_classes_must_be_kept_poor_or_they_will_never_be_industrious/
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