$2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

by Kathryn J. Edin

American poverty has generally been hidden far from most Americans’ view.

what happens when a government safety net that is built on the assumption of full-time, stable employment at a living wage combines with a low-wage labor market that fails to deliver on any of the above.

None of the people whose stories appear in this book see a handout from the government—the kind that the old system provided prior to welfare reform—as a solution to their plight. Instead, what they want more than anything else is the chance to work.

Out of every one hundred Americans, fewer than two get aid from today’s cash welfare program. Just 27 percent of poor families with children participate. There are more avid postage stamp collectors in the United States than welfare recipients.

Clinton was no friend to the poor and, like his wife later, not much of a liberal at all. The Clintons’ policies are both closer to Republican philosophies that benefit only the wealthy.

Starting in 2001, more and more families with children who were receiving SNAP began to report that they had no other source of cash income to live on—not from work, not from public assistance. By 2006, the number of such families had grown 143 percent from a decade before.