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.