By Cayman Macdonald
What does life look like living on $2 a day in America? Kathryn J. Edin and Luke Shaefer try to answer that question by following American families living virtually cashless in their 2015 book $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America.
The U.S. government considers the official poverty line for a family of three to be $16.50 per person per day, and “deep poverty” to be $8.30 per person per day. Edin and Shaefer decided to use data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to estimate how many American families were living at the World Bank’s international poverty line of about $2 per person per day. They found that approximately one out of every 25 families with kids falls below this level, and that the number of families living at this threshold skyrocketed after historic welfare legislation was passed in 1996. From 1996 to 2011, the number of families living at this level of poverty doubled.
The 1996 welfare legislation gutted a sixty year program that gave cash assistance to needy families, imposed lifetime limits on aid, and subjected able-bodied adults to work requirements. Arguably, conditions have improved for the working poor, especially with the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which gives money back to working families each year. However, for those who are having a hard time finding or holding down a job, the only government assistance available is food stamps, which can’t pay the rent or the electricity bill.
Jessica Compton, a 21-year-old mother of two living in Johnson City, Tennessee, sells her blood plasma twice a week, for $30 each time, to help her family get by. Her husband’s hours at McDonald’s were reduced to zero hours per week and they have been unable to find other work. Somehow, the $60 per week Jessica makes from donating plasma must support their family of four.
For those who can find work, it doesn’t necessarily mean a guaranteed escape from $2 a day poverty. Jennifer Hernandez, a mother of two in Chicago, has struggled through $2 a day stretches when in between work. Although she briefly had a job that paid $8.75 per hour, she did not always get full-time hours, and once she got sick from cleaning abandoned houses in the middle of the winter, her hours became virtually non-existent and she was forced to quit. With only seven months left in her eligibility for a housing subsidy and with rent for two-bedroom apartments at $960 a month without it, her family was back to living on $2 a day and she desperately needed a new job.
How do we solve this? Edin and Shaefer propose a three-pronged approach: creating more quality jobs and job training services, ensuring there is more affordable housing for low-income families, and providing a temporary cash safety net for those who simply cannot work. As more Americans are being sucked into the hopelessness of $2-a-day poverty, Edin and Shaefer highlight the urgent need for our country to put serious and innovative effort into finding solutions and motivating the political will to enact them.
