Essay About Health Problems And Jobs Skills

Poverty in America
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Poverty in America
Who are the people sleeping and living in public
places? Why are they homeless? People become homeless
for different reasons. Usually, they cannot pay for housing.
People with little education and few jobs skills cannot earn
much money. With low income, they stay poor. As housing
costs rise, more and more people cannot afford homes.
Around thirteen million children in America live in poverty
at any given time nearly two hundred thousand children are
homeless (Worth 6).
Health problems and job layoffs also keep people
from working steadily. Sometimes relatives or friends are
able to help until the poor find work. But without help poor
people often become homeless. A high rate of divorce, and
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fathers abandoning families, leaving women and children
with little or no money. There are also teen-age mothers
raising children without help (9).
This belief maybe growing as a result of significant
changes in welfare laws and hardening attitudes toward the
needy. Welfare was long considered an entitlement that the
poor could receive for a lifetime. Now states are setting
strict time limits on welfare benefits and forcing many poor
people to go to work. Meanwhile, more communities are
refusing to expand their aid to the needy, restricting
panhandling by the homeless, and permitting practices that
exploit poor migrant farm workers (Bowden 6).
All of these changes are occurring at the time when
the American poverty rate is climbing. The rise has been
blamed on a number of causes: the decay of large cities, the
bankrupt of many family farms across country, a decline in
the number of unskilled jobs traditionally filled by poor
people, and an increasing number of single-parent families
who often rely on welfare to survive. While politicians
devise ways to move people off welfare and into work, there
is no guarantee that work alone will eliminate the problem
of poverty. Most former welfare recipients move into law-
skill
jobs with no health benefits and pay rate too low to lift
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them above the poverty line(7).
It is difficult to compare poverty levels in different
countries. Countries not only have different currencies, they
have different family income levels, consumption patterns,
prices for goods and services, spending patterns, and family
and demographic characteristics. Different countries also
adopt very different criteria for setting absolute income
thresholds that define poverty. As a result, most cross-
national studies use relative measures of poverty as a basis
for comparison(Stearman8).
Poverty measures based on an international poverty
line attempt to do this. The commonly used one dollar a day
standard, measured in 1985 international prices and
adjusted
to local currency rising purchasing power parities, was chosen
for the World Bank’s World Development Report 1990:
Poverty because it is typical of the poverty lines in low-income
countries. Purchasing power parity exchange rates, such as
those from the Penn World Tables are used
because they
take into account the local prices of goods and services that
are not traded internationally. But purchasing
power parity
rates were designed not for comparing aggregates from
national accounts. As a result there is no uncertainty that an
international poverty line measure the same degree of
deprivation across countries (10).
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Just as there are problems in comparing a poverty
measure for one country with that for one country with that
for another, there can also be problems in comparing
poverty measure within countries. For example, the cost of
living is typically higher in urban than in rural areas. So the
urban monetary poverty line should be higher than the rural
poverty line. But it is not always clear that the actual
difference between urban and rural poverty lines found in
practice properly reflects the difference in the cost of living
(12).
The problem of making poverty comparisons do not
end there. Further issues arise in measuring household
living standards. The choice between income and
consumption as a welfare indicator is one issue. Income are
generally more difficult to measure accurately, and
consumption accords better with the idea of the standard of
living than does income, which can vary over time even if
the standard of living does not (Nichelason 15).