It costs more for less.

This is a personal entry so I don;t have any links this time or anything like that, I just wanted to reference one of the articles I read call the "Cost of Poverty." It struck me as pretty true which is suprising; sometime you read a statistic or fact and it suprises you because you never thought about something a certain way but sometimes its something you already knew was true, you just didn't know anybody else noticed. Thats the way I felt with this article, it talks about how the poor have to pay more because heir options are usually limited to the most immediate option for resources like food which are almost always convenience stores. A close friend lives below the poverty line and most of the time he is forced to shop at the 711 next to his house because he doesn't have a car and can't go anywhere else. Every few weeks when he asks I'll drive him to an aldi's so he can buy the bulk of his groceries but in between when he asks me for rides he is shopping at the 711 for low quality stuff that more expensive than it would be at a nicer, better place. It just makes me sad that this is the case in so many other places and that this is the state of thing because like the title of this post says, they are paying more for less which is not only unfair because there is already so much burden placed on the poverty stricken that they are basically being kicked when they are down.

Both class articles.

 Note: If you remember I forgot about the rule that these articles must be less than 30 days old so I got some really old ones.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/18/opinion/18krugman.html

1st: "Poverty is Poison" Feb 18th 2008 by Paul Krugman

What this article is about is the compiled opinion that poverty itself is unhealthy for developing children (not all that suprising but still interesting) and that after several terms of republican presidents repealling LBJ's war on poverty actions the rates for poverty among children has almost doubled. The thing is that children in poverty, in addition to poorer nutrition also have unhealthy levels of stress garnered mostly from their parents reactions their situations that cause impaired neural development, stunting both the child's ability to develope their language skills and also to memorize data. This is coupled that fact that children who grew up in poverty are less likely to graduate college than those who did not regardless of how they did at lower levels of school, perpetuates a cycle of poverty that creates toxic conditions for successful development.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/17/AR2009051702053.html

2nd "The High Cost of Poverty" May 18th 2009 by DeNeen L. Brown

"The poorer you are, the more things cost. More in money, time, hassle, exhaustion, menace." The High Cost of Poverty deals with the fact that being poor is basically expensive. Due to the lack of options in poorer neighborhoods, most low income families are forced to shop at the local corner store where the cost of doing business is higher and as such the cost of products are higher. If a family has no car  can can't pay the membership dues for places like Costco them they have no choice to spend more to get less; less selection, less quantity, and less quality.

Hunger and Homlessness: Rank pt 2.

I agree with Rank on almost all points but to be fair if I was going to say I didn't agree with him I would have to basically argue that the system is treating everyone fairly and nobody is being looked down on for being on welfare and that is an argument I don't think I can get behind. The problem I have though is that he generalizes the opponents of the welfare using society. Like many who learn fairly far to the left with regards to things like social programs (not that thats a bad thing) he see the people who disagree with him as privileged, eliteist, conservatives who are out of touch with the common people or their problems. The people who argue about welfare users or single parents considering them lazy or negligent are just as guilty but my point is that not everybody who thinks that way falls into the same catagory. For example, I know not all or even not very many lower class single moms are "looking to party (Rank pg. 19)" but I have the misfortune to know one. Her name is Maggie and she has three kids out of wedlock with different fathers. This doesn't make her a bad mother or wrong for collecting money from the government, the fact that she goes out drinking with her brother and his friends (me as part of this group) does; and when she doesn't have work she is high a lot of the time. Knowing her can't help but make me wonder how many cases like her there are. Another example (I want to remind you these are somebody elses' words not mine) is my friend Rudy whose family is in need of aid but won't apply for any because his brother tells him that welfare is "only for lazy black people," Rudy and his brother are hispanic and have voted democrat in every election. My point is that he should cast such a wide net and just write off the people who hold a different opinion that him.

Hunger and Homlessness: Rank pt1.

From Rank pt1, I chose section 2"Below the Line." This section begins with Rank relating a story about a social scientist called Charles Murray. Murray's career has been built off of controversial opinions such as his argument that the well fare system has robbed the impoverished of their work ethic and created dependant and lazy people who are incapable of building strong families and work histories. However his most notable argument was that the government should penalize out of wedlock births and alleges that they mothers in such situations are "rotten mothers (Rank p. 18)." This leads to the author's main argument which is that the poor should not be viewed as such a seperate entity and are the same as any of us and are of equal value. In the next chapters he discusses the measurement  of poverty itself and how many are or are not above the poverty line, while also briefly mentioning Johnson's war on Poverty. Several following chapters are a cross section of poverty, both domestic and international. It compares the USA's amounts above or bellow the poverty line, amount of poor, and what the poverty line is to other countries and also shows where we standing ranking with those comparisons. Later on he begins to mention the human toll of poverty, touching on the health issues that face the poor like stunted growth or the usual lack of either heating or food during winter months as well as the way they are viewed by the conservative party, being compared to dangerous animals that would establish dependancy after being "fed unaturally" for too long. It is a potent and through examination of both the state of poverty and its relations with other parts of society.

Hunger and Homlessness City Project: Los Angeles

My group will be presenting the city of LA and its' homeless and hunger situation. In the short, what we've done as a group to present this city is break it down into different sections for each person and they are given the task to research and fill out their topic to provide a good examination of the poverty situation in LA and how the city is dealing with it. For example, I volunteered to examine several programs that the city has put forward to fight poverty and hunger ((these are either public programs that are funded by tax dollars or efforts by private associations and people acting independantly of any church or religious structure)you'll see why that is important in a second); looking at their goals and how they compare to the overall problems in the city to determine their effectiveness towards the problems they are trying to fight. The other members of the group have chosen to break down the raw data presented in the Mayor's report and other figures involving poverty and hunger with an examination of the poverty level and the amounts above or below it, the treatment of homeless outside of homeless programs dealing mostly with police abuse but branching into other sectors as well, and faith based organizations who contribute a great deal to the efforts to aid the homeless and hungry but are not generally affiliated with the state or any major buisnesses or public figures and are not funded by the state or municipalities. All in all I feel its a fairly well rounded presentation that will given a good view of homelessness and hunger in LA.

Personal Definition of Poverty

It may be pretty straight forward, but my definition of poverty is that there is a fundamental lack of resources to be distributed to meet the demand for them. How much of what there is to go around at any given time must be distributed and when there is not enough (food, money, land) people are left needing resources that are just not there. Its a numbers game, all about how much Y there is for X. Really, this problem can't be avoided in society though because we've seen a drastic move from a community to a society base structure. Community being more family based and generally concerned with group needs and the good of the whole and society involving a much greater number of people and thus having to distribute a smaller pool of resources for a greater number of people without any real concern for the well being of the groups that come up short. Ideally this could be solved with some sort of communist system but if history taught us anything its that that doesn't work and in a capitalist system some not getting as much as others is basically the whole point of the economy. All we can do as a society is try to meet somewhere in the middle where society and the government build a safety net in order to catch the people who fall through the cracks with reserves set aside for that exact purpose.

Poverty in Illinois

http://www.suntimes.com/news/7713162-418/illinois-poverty-growing-as-state-help-shrinking.html
That is a link to a Sun Times article written on the 17th, and unfortunatly its about the problems facing a local homeless shelter and the sate at large. The Dep. for Human Services has had its budget cut by roughly seventeen percent, which adds up to about 669.3 million dollars and the Dep. of Child and Family Serivces has had its budget slashed by 24.5 million. Simply put, they cannot keep up. The shelter I mentioned is called the REST Shelter and since the budget cutback, they have had about one hundred thousand dollars cut from their budget and have been forced to layoff ten workers, also they can no longer operate between 8am and 4pm during the day which is when residents used to meet with case workers

“Our ability to help people to get off the street is definitely impaired,” she said. “If you can’t keep people healthy and safe and stable as far as they know they have a place to be, it’s very difficult for them to overcome their employment barriers. It’s nearly impossible.”

.

This problem is spread far and wide. More than one shelter or one city, the entire state has been consumed by this issue. On the whole, the state's poverty level is floating at about 14.1 percent which is one point eight million of Illinois' twelve million residents, that is an average almost one sixth of the population below the poverty line; and call to the state's "hunger hotline" have more than tripled since 2007.

It would be bold to say that this problem is being ignored. Public programs have always been the first on the chopping block when a politician says there is a crisis and that they have to make the tough calls. Legislators know exactly who is going to pay every time they come to budget cutting season, and they know how it will play out when they take away the last refuge of people who have no place to go. Despite the fact that we as a society are well aware of it, I will say it cannot be ignored much longer because soon the numbers of those in poverty will grow too numerous and too loud, their neglect to serious for anything less than the services we had before.

“It’s the programs that serve people who are the most vulnerable that are being hit the hardest,” said Eithne McMenamin, associate director of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. “That’s only going to exacerbate the problem.”