$2.00 a Day Quotes

“In no state today does a full-time job paying minimum wage allow a family to afford a one- or two-bedroom apartment at fair market rent.”
― Kathryn Edin, $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

“If one tallied all of the losses suffered by victims of robberies, burglaries, larcenies, and motor vehicle thefts combined, the figure wouldn't even approach what is taken from hardworking Americans' pockets by employers who violate the nation's labor laws.”
― Kathryn Edin, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

“How is it that a solid work ethic is not an adequate defense against extreme poverty?”
― Kathryn Edin, $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

“Susan’s and Jennifer’s job searches are likely made harder by the color of their skin. In the early 2000s, researchers in Chicago and Boston mailed out fake résumés to hundreds of employers, varying only the names of the applicants, but choosing names that would be seen as identifiably black or white. Strikingly, “Emily” and “Brendan” were 50 percent more likely to get called for an interview than “Lakisha” and “Jamal.” A few years later, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin conducted a similar study in Milwaukee, but with a unique twist. She recruited two black and two white actors (college students, posing as high school graduates) who were as similar as possible in every way. She sent these “job applicants” out in pairs, with virtually identical fake résumés, to apply for entry-level jobs. Her twist was to instruct one of the white and one of the black applicants to tell employers that they had a felony conviction and had just been released from prison the month before. Even the researcher was surprised by what she found: the white applicant with a felony conviction was more likely to get a positive response from a prospective employer than the black applicant with no criminal record. When the study was replicated in New York City a few years later, she and her colleagues saw similar results for Latino applicants relative to whites.”
― Kathryn Edin, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

“The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) deems a family that is spending more than 30 percent of its income on housing to be “cost burdened,” at risk of having too little money for food, clothing, and other essential expenses. Today there is no state in the Union in which a family that is supported by a full-time, minimum-wage worker can afford a two-bedroom apartment at fair market rent without being cost burdened, according to HUD.”
― Kathryn Edin, $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

“This book is about 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. It is this toxic alchemy, we argue, that is spurring the increasing numbers of $2-a-day poor in America.”
― Kathryn J. Edin, $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

“Recent research has found that when a new Walmart opens in a community, it causes an overall loss in jobs in that community”
― Kathryn Edin, $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

“What low-wage employers now seem to demand are workers whose lives have infinite give and 24-7 dedication, for little in return.”
― Kathryn Edin, $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

“The most obvious manifestation of the affordable housing crisis is in rising rents. Between 1900 and 2013, rents rose faster than inflation in virtually every region of the country and in cities, suburbs, and rural areas alike. But there is another important factor at work here that is an even bigger part of the story than the hikes in rent: a fall in the earnings of renters. Between 2000 and 2012 alone, rents rose by 6 percent. During that same period, the real income of the middling renter in the United States fell 13 percent. What was once a fissure has become a wide chasm that often can't be bridged.”
― Kathryn Edin, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

“...child welfare officials deem it inappropriate for a brother and sister to sleep in the same bedroom once they reach a certain age. At some point, if the authorities were to find out that Kaitlin and Cole were sharing a room, Jennifer would be at risk of losing custody due to "neglect." By today's standards of child well-being, Jennifer can't move into a studio apartment to help balance her family's budget.”
― Kathryn Edin, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

“Of the $16.5 billion the federal government transfers to states for TANF, more than $11 billion is siphoned off for other uses, sometimes to fund a state’s child welfare system. Strained state budgets are thus eased. TANF has become welfare for the states rather than aid for families”
― Kathryn Edin, $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

“Providing the ultimate safety net is the role that Temporary Assistance for Needy Families is supposed to play, but it hasn’t proved to be up to the task. Part of the reason TANF isn’t doing its job is that it is a block grant given to the states, which have broad flexibility as to how they spend the money. This means that they have plenty of reasons to keep families off the rolls, because if they do, they get to use the money for other, related purposes.”
― Kathryn Edin, $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

“Already in 2001, 63 percent of very low income households were putting more than half their income toward housing, leaving too little for other necessities. As of 2011, that figure stood at nearly 70 percent. What”
― Kathryn Edin, $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

“Parents like Jennifer, Susan, and Rae express desires that are quite modest. Full-time hours come first. That is a prize that can be astonishingly hard to wrest from a low-wage employer who wants to avoid added costs associated with full-time employment, such as health insurance and paid time off. A predictable schedule, so parents can arrange for safe, reliable child care, comes next. A few say they would be happy if they could get just those two things. Yet finding a job with even those basic attributes is something Susan Brown feels she can only dream of, not expect. Most parents, like Jennifer and Rae, hope for a little more. If they could just make $12 or $13 per hour, they say, they could make it; $15 per hour is really shooting the moon. Safe working conditions, and some sick or personal days, would be a real plus. The other “extras” that once came routinely with a full-time job—health insurance, vacation days, and retirement benefits—don’t often come up in conversations with the $2-a-day poor. These perks are so uncommon among the jobs available to low-wage workers that they seem all but outside the bounds of reality.”
― Kathryn Edin, $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

“Although the 1996 welfare reform pushed millions of low-income single moms into the workforce, it did nothing to improve the conditions of low-wage jobs. In fact, if anything, economic theory (and plain old common sense) might support the opposite conclusion: although we can’t know for sure, it stands to reason that by moving millions of unskilled single mothers into the labor force starting in the mid-1990s, welfare reform and the expansion of the EITC and other refundable tax credits may have actually played a role in diminishing the quality of the average low-wage job in America. As unskilled single mothers flooded into the workforce at unprecedented rates, they greatly increased the pool of workers available to low-wage employers. When more people compete for the same jobs, wages usually fall relative to what they would have been otherwise. Employers can also demand more of their employees. What”
― Kathryn Edin, $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

“Yet laying the blame on a lack of personal responsibility obscures the fact that there are powerful and ever-changing structural forces at play here. Service sector employers often engage in practices that middle-class professionals would never accept. They adopt policies that, purposely or not, ensure regular turnover among their low-wage workers, thus cutting the costs that come with a more stable workforce, including guaranteed hours, benefits, raises, promotions, and the like. Whatever can be said about the characteristics of the people who work low-wage jobs, it is also true that the jobs themselves too often set workers up for failure. The”
― Kathryn Edin, $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

“America’s cash welfare program—the main government program that caught people when they fell—was not merely replaced with the 1996 welfare reform; it was very nearly destroyed. In its place arose a different kind of safety net, one that provides a powerful hand up to some—the working poor—but offers much less to others, those who can’t manage to find or keep a job.”
― Kathryn Edin, $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

“The Truly Disadvantaged, the most important book written about poverty in the past three decades. It was Wilson who first observed, famously, that a poor child fared worse when she grew up among only poor neighbors than she would have if she’d been raised in a neighborhood that included members of the middle class, too. Wilson argued that the reason poverty had persisted in America even in the face of the War on Poverty declared by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 was that in the 1970s and 1980s, poor African Americans had become increasingly isolated, relegated to sections of the city where their neighbors were more and more likely to be poor, and less and less likely to find gainful employment.”
― Kathryn Edin, $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

“It further appeared that the experience of living below the $2-a-day threshold didn’t discriminate by family type or race. While single-mother families were most at risk of falling into a spell of extreme destitution, more than a third of the households in $2-a-day poverty were headed by a married couple. And although the rate of growth was highest among African Americans and Hispanics, nearly half of the $2-a-day poor were white. One”
― Kathryn Edin, $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

“In early 2011, 1.5 million households with roughly 3 million children were surviving on cash incomes of no more than $2 per person, per day in any given month.”
― Kathryn Edin, $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

“Even the researcher was surprised by what she found: the white applicant with a felony conviction was more likely to get a positive response from a prospective employer than the black applicant with no criminal record. When the study was replicated in New York City a few years later, she and her colleagues saw similar results for Latino applicants relative to whites.”
― Kathryn Edin, $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

“In the early 2000s, researchers in Chicago and Boston mailed out fake résumés to hundreds of employers, varying only the names of the applicants, but choosing names that would be seen as identifiably black or white. Strikingly, “Emily” and “Brendan” were 50 percent more likely to get called for an interview than “Lakisha” and “Jamal.”
― Kathryn Edin, $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

“Had the Ellwood plan passed, perhaps her downward spiral into $2-a-day poverty, and her repeated spells of homelessness, could have been avoided. No one will ever know for sure.”
― Kathryn Edin, $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

“Two dollars is less than the cost of a gallon of gas, roughly equivalent to that of a half gallon of milk. Many Americans have spent more than that before they get to work or school in the morning. Yet in 2011, more than 4 percent of all households with children in the world’s wealthiest nation were living in a poverty so deep that most Americans don’t believe it even exists in this country.”
― Kathryn Edin, $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

“If the experiences of such countries are any guide, the replacement of a formal economy with an informal one—unregulated and unpoliced—may have a self-perpetuating effect of pushing the $2-a-day poor further and further out of the American mainstream.”
― Kathryn J. Edin, $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

“It is hard to imagine a more elegant table at which to share a meal. Yet here it sits-never used, never disturbed-accompanied by a single chair.

This table harks back to a different era, a better time in the life of Susan's family, when owning this house in this part of Chicago signaled the achievement of middle-class African American respectability. Before the economic anchors of this far South Side neighborhood closed down-the steel yards in the 1960's, the historic Pullman railway car company in the early 1980's, and the mammoth Sherwin-Williams paint factory in 1995-Roseland was a community with decent-paying, stable jobs. It was a good place to raise your kids.
As the jobs left, the drugs arrived. 'It got worse, it changed.' Susan says, 'There's too much violence...unnecessary violence at that.' Given what her family has been through, this is more than a bit of an understatement. Susan's brother was shot in broad daylight just one block away. Her great-grandmother has fled to a meager retirement out west. Susan's family would like nothing more than to find a better place to live, safer streets and a home that isn't crumbling around them. Yet despite all its ills, this house is the only thing keeping Susan, Devin, and Lauren off the streets. They have spent the past few months surviving on cash income so low that it adds up to less than $2 per person, per day. With hardly a cent to their names, they have nowhere else to go.”
― Kathryn J. Edin, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

“Government-subsidized private sector job creation is one way forward. Recently, the federal government sponsored a promising short-term subsidized jobs program through something called the TANF Emergency Fund. States that chose to participate were allowed to use TANF dollars to provide employers (mostly in the private sector) with incentives to hire unemployed workers, targeting those on TANF or those who were in a spell of extended unemployment. Each state was given considerable leeway to design the program however it saw fit, often in close collaboration with employers. Across the District of Columbia and the thirty-nine states that took part in the program, employers created more than 260,000 jobs with an investment of only $1.3 billion dollars. Roughly two-thirds of participating employers said they created positions that would not have existed otherwise, and the businesses that took part expressed, on the whole, eagerness to participate in such a program in the future. Further, many participants remained employed after the subsidy ended, and those who had experienced significant trouble finding work especially made gains. Researchers who studied the program noted that it garnered “strong support from employers, workers, and state and local officials from across the political spectrum.” Creating a subsidized jobs program modeled on the TANF Emergency Fund would be one way to improve the circumstances of America’s $2-a-day poor.”
― Kathryn Edin, $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

“As a practical matter, it is far more difficult to traffic in SNAP than it once was. Back in the days when folks got paper food stamp coupons rather than electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards, they could easily trade the coupons for cash. But today’s SNAP card has your name on it and requires you to enter a personal identification number, or PIN, when you swipe your card at the register, meaning that in most cases you would want to be physically present at a fraudulent transaction. If you were to simply give someone your EBT card and PIN so that he could buy food for himself and then give you cash back, what’s to keep the person from using up all your benefits? Do you really want to trust someone with one of your most valuable assets, especially when you already know he is not above breaking the law? In”
― Kathryn Edin, $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

“In the fine print on a food stamp application, it is made clear that selling SNAP can result in a felony charge. And the penalty can be stiff. The SNAP application in Illinois (and other states) says that you can “be fined up to $250,000 and put in prison up to 20 years or both” for the offense. One signal of how strongly a society feels about a particular violation of the law is the maximum sentence that can be imposed on offenders. Possession of small amounts of marijuana carries little legal penalty in most jurisdictions for a first-time offense. Under the U.S. federal sentencing guidelines, a person with a “minimal criminal history” would have to commit an offense at base level 37 to earn up to twenty years in prison. By comparison, voluntary manslaughter earns a base level 29, which could result in nine years in prison. Aggravated assault with a firearm that causes bodily injury to the victim merits only a base level 24, which could yield a five-year sentence. Abusive sexual contact with a child under age twelve also merits a base level 24. Astonishingly, at least in terms of the letter of the law, when Jennifer sells her SNAP, she risks a far longer prison term than the one José was subject to for molesting Kaitlin. As”
― Kathryn Edin, $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

“Survival strategies come in three forms. The first is taking advantage of public spaces and private charities—the nation’s libraries, food pantries, homeless shelters, and so on. Then come a variety of income-generation strategies, such as donating plasma—means for gleaning at least some of that all-important resource that families seem unable to survive without: cash. Finally, there’s the art—often finely honed through years of hardship—of finding ways to stretch your resources and make do with less.   Public”
― Kathryn Edin, $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America