Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

by Barbara Ehrenreich

it’s hard to see why a place like, say, Clearview, Minnesota, would be a destination at any time of the year.

Indeed, it is probably impossible for the private sector to provide everyone with an adequate standard of living through wages, or even wages plus benefits, alone: too much of what we need, such as reliable child care, is just too expensive, even for middle-class families.

One reason nobody bothers to pull all these stories together and announce a widespread state of emergency may be that Americans of the newspaper-reading professional middle class are used to thinking of poverty as a consequence of unemployment.