The Poor and Poverty

Kevin Alsina

Professor: Culbertson

Poverty

Three key ideas as related to macro practice.

• Poverty is the condition of having no money to buy the necessities in life. The definition has been expanded to include the culture of poverty which includes deprivation and lack of social development due to unattained resources which is considered economic inadequacy.
• Poverty is related to a social class. There are variables to increase the potential for poverty. These variables include being a female, being a person of color, and the feminization of poverty: which means that women are more likely to be poor then men.
• The structural causes for poverty include economic and political factors that also includes discrimination of race and gender. Some individual factors include having little capitol, living in a single parent family, and having a disability.  

The Poor are poor because of the limitation and restrictions on the programs available to this marginalized class of people. There was the Poor Law Amendment Act enacted in 1834, the workhouse law limited how much aid a person received aid could get because at one-time men and women would not work because they could get just as much money as the working poor and made people become residents of a community to receive aid.

 Poverty reaches every area in life to include poorer health care, lower education levels, low paying jobs, and poor housing. This class of people are trying to survive, they do not have time to worry about how their situation is or is not just keeping food on the table and a roof over their heads is worry enough.

Given all the attention and resources given to eradication of poverty, why does poverty still exist in the US to this day? Poverty has been around since the beginning of time there will always be poverty until the nations of the world get rid of the class system. The class system keeps the people of the world divided. There also an idea that the social structure is a factor in society that does not provide the opportunity for everyone to find a job.

There are three aspects of structure to include political, economic, and discrimination based on gender and race. The economic explanation is poverty exist because there are not enough jobs that pay a lot of money. They offer subpar wages for people to exist, so they just get by without any chance of sustaining any wealth. The technical jobs of today require training: if a person cannot afford training then they get left behind. Another explanation of poverty is political. Politicians make social policies as a result these policies can decrease, increase, or maintain poverty.