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Thirty million Americans remain completely uninsured a decade after the passage of the Affordable Care Act.[4]
Half of all new positions are eliminated within the first year.
When we are preoccupied by poverty, “we have less mind to give to the rest of life.”
Between 2000 and 2022, in the average American city the cost of fuel and utilities increased by 115 percent.[5]
States aren’t required to spend all of their TANF dollars each year, and many don’t,
2020, states had in their possession almost $6 billion in unspent welfare funds.
Social Security Disability Insurance
the American welfare state is a leaky bucket.[21]
and almost 93 percent of Medicaid and even Supplemental Security Income dollars flow directly
born in another country. Today, one in eight is.
immigrants have some of the highest rates of economic mobility in the country.
full well that the undocumented population peaked over fifteen years ago, in 2007.
affordable childcare, and universal pre-K. Instead,
New Hope is one of several programs that have boosted marriage rates, not by offering relationship counseling or organizing workshops—initiatives that almost never work—but by providing couples with enough economic stability to try for a life together.[34]
Bad jobs, unobtainable college degrees, mass incarceration,
many single parents simply can’t afford to work more because of childcare costs.[41]
One popular theory for American poverty is deindustrialization,
and one side is annihilated or enslaved or colonized or dispossessed to enrich the other.
renting shabby housing to very poor families.
that one man’s
To do so, David Card and Alan Krueger, both economists at Princeton, surveyed 410 fast food restaurants in each state before and after the wage hike.
United Farm Workers’ 1965 Delano grape strike
Their efforts paid off. Worker pay climbed,
As global trade expanded and plants shuttered, unions collapsed, and corporate interests made sure they remained weak.
economic growth or deliver prosperity to more people. “We were promised
not the bottom 10, 20, or even 50 percent, but the bottom 90 percent—saw
annual earnings gains of only 24 percent,
than their parents did, but this was the case for only 50 percent of Americans by the late 1990s.
are often the result of policy decisions such as the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA),
big reason is that those countries managed to keep their unions.[25]
today’s businesses now farm out positions to independent contractors.
Today, temp agencies compete over who can offer the cheapest labor.
Many employers now discourage or outright prohibit workers from discussing wages and salaries
But in America, Uber drivers and other gig
while unions spent a combined total of roughly $25 million.
leading to unpredictable hours that cause paychecks to grow and shrink from week to week.
Earned Income Tax Credit.
the EITC enjoys such widespread support is because it functions as a generous handout to corporations.
whose low wages
When Walmart announced in 2015 that it planned to increase its starting wage
how these campaigns can distract from those companies’ abysmal labor practices,
the average Black worker makes roughly 74 cents for every dollar the average white worker does.)
Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in the rental housing market.
When tenements began appearing in New York City in the mid-1800s, their rent was as much as 30 percent higher than that of better apartments uptown. This was true even in the poorest slums.[2]
between 1 and 10 percent of the total, depending on the type of check.
will pay between $10 and $100 just to receive the money he has earned, effectively losing one to ten hours of work.
charge of $15 per $100 lent might sound reasonable, but it equates to an APR of 400 percent.
Just like that, you are charged $120 for borrowing $400,
The average borrower stays indebted for five months, paying $520 in fees to borrow $375.
It sees you signing the extension papers.
