The Poverty Of The United States - 1755 Words

Poverty can be defined as a condition that people suffer from due to lack of economic resources. For being such a prosperous country, the United States possesses a persistent problem. The problem is the poverty rate in America and how it has become a force that continuously grows. One fact that American citizens are not aware of or do not wish to implement in their minds is that nearly 50 million people in the United States live in poverty. Amongst the 50 million people in the United States that live below the poverty line, over 5 million more were women than man. This phenomenon as to in which women experience poverty at far higher rates than men is described as feminization of poverty, a term coined by Diana Pearce in 1978 (3: Thibos).†¦show more content†¦One of his main arguments was that federal welfare became so generous that it led to women preferring unwed motherhood and indolence over getting married and obtaining jobs (315: Edin and Lein). An associate professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, Kathryn Edin, teamed up with Laura Lein, a senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin, in order to express whether the benefits of living off the welfare program in the United States actually enabled single mothers to make ends meet. Edin and Lein conducted a study by interviewing 379 single mothers in Boston, Charleston, Chicago, and San Antonio and displayed their studies in â€Å"Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive on a Welfare Check†. Amongst these single mothers, 214 were welfare-reliant mothers and they were the people that Edin and Lein focused on in order to test the assumption of whether the welfare system was being abused or not. All 214 of these women and their 464 children relied on the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the government income transfer program for poor families that consisted of non-elders. On average these single mothers spent $213 a month on housing, $262 on food, $336 on other necessary expenses, and $64 on items that were not necessarily essential. This summed up to be a total of $876 being spent on an average family of 3.17 people. Although the money they were receiving was helping them reach their goal of