Top Quotes: “$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America” — Kathryn Edin

Introduction

“They have spent the past few months surviving on cash income so low that it adds up to less than $2 per person, per day. With hardly a cent to their names, they have nowhere else to go.

Two dollars is less than the cost of a gallon of gas, roughly equivalent to that of a half gallon of milk. Many Americans have spent more than that before they get to work or school in the morning. Yet in 2011, more than 4 percent of all households with children in the world’s wealthiest nation were living in a poverty so deep that most Americans don’t believe it even exists in this country.”

“In early 2011, 1.5 million households with roughly 3 million children were surviving on cash incomes of no more than $2 per person, per day in any given month. That’s about one out of every twenty-five families with children in America. What’s more, not only were these figures astoundingly high, but the phenomenon of $2-a-day poverty among households with children had been on the rise since the nation’s landmark welfare reform legislation was passed in 1996 — and at a distressingly fast pace. As of 2011, the number of families in $2-a-day poverty had more than doubled in just a decade and a half.

It further appeared that the experience of living below the $2-a-day threshold didn’t discriminate by family type or race. While single-mother families were most at risk of falling into a spell of extreme destitution, more than a third of the households in $2-a-day poverty were headed by a married couple. And although the rate of growth was highest among African Americans and Hispanics, nearly half of the $2-a-day poor were white.

One piece of good news in these findings was that the government safety net was helping at least some households. When Shaefer added in SNAP as if it were cash — a problematic assumption because SNAP cannot legally be converted to cash, so it can’t be used to pay the light bill, the rent, or buy a bus pass — the number of families living in $2-a-day poverty fell by about half. This vital in-kind government program was clearly reaching many, though not all, of the poorest of the poor. Even counting SNAP as cash, though, Shaefer found that the increase in the number of families with children living in $2-a-day poverty remained large — up 70 percent in fifteen years.”

“America’s cash welfare program — the main government program that caught people when they fell — was not merely replaced with the 1996 welfare reform; it was very nearly destroyed. In its place arose a different kind of safety net, one that provides a powerful hand up to some — the working poor — but offers much less to others, those who can’t manage to find or keep a job. This book is about what happens when a government safety net that is built on the assumption of full-time, stable employment at a living wage combines with a low-wage labor market that fails to deliver on any of the above.

It is this toxic alchemy, we argue, that is spurring the increasing numbers of $2-a-day poor in America. A hidden but growing landscape of survival strategies among those who experience this level of destitution has been the result. At the community level, these strategies can pull families into a web of exploitation and illegality that turns conventional morality upside down.

None of the people whose stories appear in this book see a handout from the government — the kind that the old system provided prior to welfare reform — as a solution to their plight. Instead, what they want more than anything else is the chance to work. They would like nothing better than to have a full-time job paying $12 or $13 an hour, a modest dwelling in a safe neighborhood, and some stability above all else. In the 1990s, we, as a country, began a transformation of the social safety net that serves poor families with children. More aid has been rendered to a group that was previously without much in the way of government assistance — the working poor. Extending the nation’s safety net in this way has improved the lives of millions of Americans. But there are simply not enough jobs, much less good jobs, to go around. And for those without work, there is no longer a guarantee of cash assistance.”

Welfare

“That’s when things really started to fall apart. Modonna was approved for unemployment insurance, which is fairly rare among low-wage workers in the service sector, where low earnings and unstable work hours can make it hard to meet the program’s eligibility criteria.

She knows she was lucky in this regard. But her benefits — which didn’t begin to approach what she was making at Stars — weren’t enough to cover the cost of her rent.”

“After another few minutes, an official-looking woman with a clipboard emerges from a closed door at the side of the waiting room. She approaches those remaining in line, person by person, quietly informing each of the day’s “latecomers” that caseworkers will be able to see only those who arrived by 7:30 a.m. and got a number from the staff person who was on duty at the time. Finally, she reaches Modonna. “Do you have a number?” Modonna shakes her head no. “Well, you’ll have to come back tomorrow,” she says. She urges Modonna to arrive earlier next time, her tone implying, What were you thinking, showing up at 8:00 a.m.? Everyone knows you have to get here by at least 7:30, a full hour before the office opens.”

“Out of every 100 Americans, fewer than 2 get aid from today’s cash welfare program. Just 27 percent of poor families with children participate. There are more avid post-age stamp collectors in the United States than welfare recipients.

In 1996, welfare reform did away with a sixty-year-old program that entitled families with children to receive cash assistance as long as they had economic need. It was replaced with a new welfare program, called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) — the one Modonna waited in line for — which imposes lifetime limits on aid and also subjects able-bodied adult recipients to work requirements. If they fail to meet those requirements, they risk being “sanctioned” — losing some or even all of their benefits.

At the old welfare program’s height in 1994, it served , more, than 14.2 million people -4.6 million adults and

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9.6 million children. In 2012, the year Modonna took her trip to the DHS office, there were only 4.4 million people left on the rolls-1.1 million adults (about a quarter of

•whom were working) and 3.3 million kids. That’s a 69. percent decline. By fall 2014, the TANF caseload had fallen to 3.8 million.

Before 1996, welfare was putting à sizable dent in the number of families living below the $2-a-day threshold. As of early 1996, the program was lifting more than a million households with children out of $2-a-day poverty every month. Whatever else could be said for or against welfare, it provided a safety net for the poorest of the poor. In the late 1990s, as welfare reform was of the poor gradually implemented across the states, its impact in reducing $2-a-day poverty began to decline precipitously. By mid-2011, TANF was lifting only about 300,000 households with children above the $2-a-day mark.

One reason families in $2-a-day poverty — whose incomes are far beneath the threshold TANF requires — often fail to claim benefits is because it just doesn’t occur to them to do so. Many, like Modonna, believe that getting cash from the government is no longer a viable option, no matter how desperate the need.”

“Welfare’s virtual extinction has gone all but unnoticed by the American public and the press. But also unnoticed by many has been the expansion of other types of help for the poor. Thanks in part to changes made by the George W. Bush administration, more poor individuals claim SNAP than ever before. The State Children’s Health Insurance Program (now called CHIP, minus the “State”) was created in 1997 to expand the availability of public health insurance to millions of lower-income children. More recently, the Affordable Care Act has made health care coverage even more accessible to lower-income adults with and without children.

Perhaps most important, a system of tax credits aimed at the working poor, especially those with dependent children, has grown considerably. The most important of these is the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). The EITC is refundable, which means that if the amount for which low-income workers are eligible is more than they owe in taxes, they will get a refund for the difference. Low-income working parents often get tax refunds that are far greater than the income taxes withheld from their paychecks during the year. These tax credits provide a significant income boost to low-income parents working a formal job (parents are not eligible if they’re working off the books). Because tax credits like the EITC are viewed by many as being pro-work, they have long enjoyed support from Democrats and Republicans alike. But here’s the catch: only those who are working can claim them.

These expansions of aid for the working poor mean that even after a watershed welfare reform, we, as a country, aren’t spending less on poor families than we once did. In fact, we now spend much more.”

“More programs targeting poor families were passed as part of Johnson’s Great Society and its War on Poverty than at any other time in American history. Congress made the fledgling Food Stamp Program permanent (although the program grew dramatically during the 1970s under President Richard Nixon) and increased federal funds for school breakfasts and lunches, making them free to children from poor families. Social Security was expanded to better serve the poorest of its claimants, Head Start was born, and new health insurance programs for the poor (Medicaid) and elderly (Medicare) were created.

What the War on Poverty did not do was target the cash welfare system (by then renamed Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC) for expansion. Yet the late 1960s and early 1970s marked the greatest period of caseload growth in the program’s history. Between 1964 and 1976, the number of Americans getting cash assistance through AFDC nearly tripled, from 4.2 million to 11.3 million. This dramatic rise was driven in part by the efforts of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). A group led by welfare recipients and radical social workers, the NWRO brought poor families to welfare offices to demand aid and put pressure on program administrators to treat applicants fairly.

The NWRO was also the impetus behind a series of court decisions in the late 1960s and the 1970s that struck down discriminatory practices that had kept some families over the prior decades off the welfare rolls, particularly those headed by blacks, as well as divorced and never-married mothers. Through “man in the house” rules, state caseworkers had engaged in midnight raids to ensure that recipients had no adult males living in the home. In addition, “suitable home” requirements had enabled caseworkers to exclude applicants if a home visit revealed “disorder.” Some instituted “white glove test” to ensure “good housekeeping.” An applicant could be denied if the caseworker’s white glove revealed dust on a windowsill or the fireplace mantel.

When these practices were struck down, the caseloads grew bigger, and with rising caseloads came rising expenditures. No longer was cash welfare an inconsequential footnote among government programs. It was now a significant commitment of the federal and state governments in its own right. As costs increased, AFDC’s unpopularity only grew.”

“President Reagan famously quipped that “we waged a war on poverty, and poverty won.” Judged by the size of the welfare rolls, Reagan’s campaign against welfare was at least as futile. By 1988, there were 10.9 million recipients on AFDC, about the same number as when he took office.”

“During this time, Elwood came to a critical realization: Americans didn’t hate the poor as much as they hated welfare. In fact, during the very years that Reagan was fighting his war on welfare, the number of Americans who thought we were spending too little on help for the poor actually rose, up from 63 percent in 1986 to 70 percent in 1988. The public’s concern with welfare was not about how much it cost, but rather about the terms under which aid was given. Many scholars argued that Murray’s claims weren’t credible, but even so, no one could really assert that the current welfare program was either pro-work or pro-marriage. Ellwood concluded that if government aid to the poor could be restructured in such a way as to promote work and promote family, perhaps the American public would come to be more generous.”

“Most observers expected Republicans to do well in the 1994 midterm elections, but virtually no one predicted the extent of the landslide. The GOP made historic gains in both houses and took full control of Congress for the first time since 1954. As Newt Gingrich prepared to take over as Speaker of the House, no Republican then in office had ever served under a Republican Speaker.”

“With Haskins’ help, Republicans seized the opportunity to craft their own version of welfare reform, building on what they had proposed in the Contract with America, the Republican policy document used as a blueprint for the 1994 campaign. The program they envisioned would be brought closer to the people, so to speak, by passing all federal welfare funds to the states in the form of block grants (spending on which could be capped at the federal level). This would allow states greater latitude in how they spent the money, which would not all have to go to providing cash aid to the poor.

Yet for congressional Republicans, it wasn’t acceptable simply to send money down to the states with no strings attached. To keep all of its block grant, a state would be required to meet stringent benchmarks for workforce participation among recipients. At first, governors balked at this demand. Everyone knew that work programs cost money, and a lot of it. But then a critical compromise was struck, based on an idea hatched by Robert Rector of the conservative Heritage Foundation. The work participation requirements could be met by reducing the welfare rolls, by any means. It didn’t matter if recipients left cash assistance for work or not, they would still be counted as meeting the work requirement.

Perhaps even more important than the new work requirements was the fact that the new block grant structure essentially capped funding for the program, so a state couldn’t be expected to provide assistance if the cost exceeded its allotment. Now it could say, “Sorry, we’ve run out of money.” The plan also mandated that states impose a five-year lifetime benefit cap for cash assistance using federal funds, but they could choose to impose shorter time limits if they wished. Recipients who exceeded the time limit would have no access to any cash assistance at all. Furthermore, there were no provisions to ensure former recipients subsidized or public jobs. Most important, under the new plan, no one with children would have the legal right to receive a dime of cash welfare from the government, even if the family had no other means of support. The old welfare pro-gram, AFDC, had ensured that right.

David Elwood watched from his perch at Health and Human Services, believing that these welfare “reform” efforts had veered completely off the rails. The new plan wasn’t a hand up, it was a hand off — off the rolls, off assistance — with no attempt to make sure families landed in a better place. It was, in effect, his worst nightmare, his ideas used in a way that he had never intended.”

“While her husband was working inside the administration, Marian Wright Edelman published an op-ed in the Washington Post in November 1995, telling the president that “irreparable damage will be inflicted on children if you permit to be destroyed the fundamental moral principle that an American child, regardless of the state or parents the child chanced to draw, is entitled to protection of last resort by his or her national govern-ment.” Then an internal administration report authored by Wendell Primus and Sheila Zedlewski of the Urban Institute was leaked to the Los Angeles Times. It projected that the Senate version of the welfare reform bill — the more moderate of the two — would nonetheless “push 1.1 million more children into poverty, an increase of almost 11 percent.”

Thus, by the fall of 1995 it was public knowledge that Marian Wright Edelman was vehemently opposed to the bill. Further, a respected analyst within the president’s own administration predicted that the bill would send more than a million children into poverty. The White House braced for public outrage. Yet calls did not flood the White House switchboard, nor did angry letters overflow the mailroom. In fact, in the weeks following the release of Primus’s report, Clinton’s job approval rating spiked to its highest level in more than a year and a half.”

“Wendell Primus immediately resigned from his post. In short order, so did Mary Jo Bane and Peter Edelman. Edelman and Bane made the decision together. After they spotted each other across the table at a Health and Human Services meeting, Edelman remembers saying, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” It would have been their responsibility, as members of the administration, to implement the new legislation, which they had opposed. They left without public statement, sending emails only to their respective staffs explaining their decisions. Yet the act garnered front-page coverage across the country. The Washington Post noted that the twin resignations amounted to “an unusually public move that underscores the deep divisions within the administration over the legislation.” The New York Times highlighted “the resignation of Mr. Edelman “as a “particular rebuke.””

“Welfare reform coincided with a fundamental shift in the way low-income single mothers thought about parenting. In the years prior to welfare reform, in-depth conversations with hundreds of single mothers on welfare illuminated their belief that taking a full-time job would greatly detract from their ability to be a good parent, especially if they had young children. Then came the roaring 1990s, when an unprecedented number of these single mothers found themselves going to work, “pushed” by the changes in the welfare rules and “pulled” by the EITC expansions, minimum-wage increase, and unprecedented strength of the economy.

Years after welfare reform, when researchers engaged in a further series of in-depth conversations with former welfare recipients, the typical single mom talked about work in a very different way from those interviewed just a few years before. Now she was telling researchers that to be a good parent, she had to model the value of education by getting a job. For these single mothers, the idea of returning to welfare violated their views of what being a good parent required, adding a self-imposed stigma to the potent societal stigma that came with claiming benefits from the program.

The simplest explanation of all, however, for why families are not turning to the assistance that can be gleaned from TANF comes from Modonna Harris back in Chicago. That is, as the cash assistance rolls plummeted in just a few years’ time, TANF receipt became rare enough among the poor that it has simply faded from view. No one in Modonna’s network of family and friends knew anyone who was getting welfare — even those in obvious need.”

Work

“There are powerful and ever-changing structural forces at play here. Service sector employers often engage in practices that middle-class professionals would never accept. They adopt policies that, purposely or not, ensure regular turnover among their low-wage workers, thus cutting the costs that come with a more stable workforce, including guaranteed hours, benefits, raises, promotions, and the like. Whatever can be said about the characteristics of the people who work low wage jobs, it is also true that the jobs themselves too often set workers up for failure.

The costs of paying their workers are often the only expenses over which service sector employers have any real control. They can’t control consumer demand, but by using “just-in-time” scheduling practices, they can peg their labor costs as closely as possible to fluctuations in demand. In doing so, they seek to maintain flexibility in their commitments to the people they employ. If customer traffic gets heavy on weekday evenings, they can move more workers to those shifts. If fewer customers are coming in on Sundays, they can cut the number of cashiers who clock in on that day or send them home early.”

“Many employers with a large low-wage workforce engage in a practice termed “work loading,” which responds to downturns in demand with informal layoffs: employers keep employees on the payroll but reduce their scheduled hours, sometimes even to zero. A worker who usually gets thirty-two hours might find that the next week’s schedule has her listed only for five. Or she might be sent home in the middle of a shift if the foot traffic is slow.

The extreme of this phenomenon is the growing prevalence of “on-call” shifts. In recent years, many service sector employers have begun requiring workers to be available on certain days and at certain times even when they aren’t working. They might be expected to call in (or even show up) each day and, if a supervisor demands it, report to work in short order. If they are not needed, they get no compensation for the time spent on call.

The allocation of hours can also be a way for managers to reward “good” workers and punish “bad” ones. If, for example, a worker were to block off weekend or evening hours during which she would be unavailable for work — so that she could be home with her children, perhaps, or work a second job — she might see her hours reduced as a result.”

“As Jennifer’s hours were cut in half in response to the sick days she was accruing, the size of her paycheck fell by half as well. The following February, when tax time rolled around, she might be penalized for this drop in earnings with a lower tax refund, because the EITC operates according to the principle that the more you work, the more you get from the government, up to the plateau point.”

“By contrast, SNAP goes up as wages go down. But even this program can be hard to manage with an unstable job. When someone like Jennifer starts working, her SNAP benefits are reduced by about 30 cents for every dollar she earns, not a welcome development with rent to pay and an apartment to furnish. Each fluctuation in her paycheck must be reported to the Department of Human Services (DHS) office, which administers SNAP. If she were to fail to report an uptick in hours — even if she thought it was just temporary — she would risk being accused of fraud. She might even have to pay back the “excess” benefits. Worse yet, she could be barred from the program for life. But if her hours dwindled to zero, it might take DHS a month or more to adjust her benefits upward, and her family might go hungry in the interim.”

“Jennifer rejects the idea of taking “handouts,” even now in her third spell of $2-a-day poverty in as many years, and so she won’t even apply for welfare.”

“After a year of remedial course work to make up for the poor quality of her high school education, she was almost ready to advance to the for-credit classes that would begin to count toward her degree. But soon after she and Devin were married, Susan got pregnant again. Antibiotics she had been prescribed had apparently neutralized her birth control. “They told me, ‘You have to read the packets. But who reads the packets?”

Because of the prior stillbirth, Susan’s pregnancy was considered high risk. Constant trips to the doctor made it difficult for her to keep up with a full class schedule.”

“It turns out that the average criminal background check can be wildly inaccurate. An employer might use only an individual’s name, maybe along with her birth year. When Susan asked someone at one place where she interviewed why she didn’t get the job, she was told — off the record — that when they ran her criminal background check, a Susan Brown from Texas popped up with a list of serious offenses: drugs, grand theft auto, the list went on and on. Never mind the fact that Susan has never been to Texas. With so many applicants to choose from, why would an employer go any further than that? Now that she knows about her Texas counterpart, Susan begs at every interview that they use her Social Security number to conduct the background check, warning them that otherwise, her notorious Texan doppelganger will appear. But that’s one more strike against her: it seems likely that Susan has given more than one prospective employer reason for pause by making such a big deal about the criminal background check during her interview.”

“Rae is proud of her acumen with numbers. Her strategy for memorizing bar codes was to make a list of the most popular produce items and their codes. When she returned home from work at night, she would read them into a recording device on her cell phone and set it to play throughout the night as she slept.”

“The cashiers in the store knew that if they needed a shift covered, Rae was good for it. One thing she could rely on George and Camilla to do was watch Azara, even if that meant just putting her in front of the TV. Rae would add an early morning shift, an “evening” shift (3:00 p.m. to 17:00 p.m.), or a weekend shift whenever she could. “Yep, I’ll do it” was very nearly her mantra, and maybe that, too, was a way to cope with the chaos at home.

But then came the day when she climbed into George’s pickup and the gas light flashed on as she turned the key in the ignition. She had just used her entire paycheck to pay the rent, buy groceries and diapers, and give George the agreed-upon $50 for gas so she could take the truck to and from work. Yet over the weekend, George and Camilla had used all the gas running errands. When she marched back into the house to confront them, they daimed they were completely broke, unable to put anything in the tank. Frantic, Rae called her manager, explained the situation, and told him she wouldn’t have any cash until the next payday, two weeks away. Could someone give her a lift? Could they float the two-time “cashier of the month” a short-term loan? In response, the store manager informed her that if she couldn’t find a way to get to work on time, she shouldn’t bother coming in again.

Even after all Rae had been through, this felt like one of the worst moments in her life.”

“It stands to reason that by moving millions of unskilled single mothers into the labor force starting in the mid-1990s, welfare reform and the expansion of the EITC and other refundable tax credits may have actually played a role in diminishing the quality of the average low wage job in America. As unskilled single mothers flooded into the workforce at unprecedented rates, they greatly increased the pool of workers available to low-wage employers. When more people compete for the same jobs, wages usually fall relative to what they would have been otherwise. Employers can also demand more of their employees.

What low-wage employers now seem to demand are workers whose lives have infinite give and 24–7 dedication, for little in return. Only an employer who is guaranteed a steady stream of desperate job applicants could require a worker to be on call, ready to come in if needed, with no promise of hours. Labor practices such as work loading and on-call shifts are important tools for service sector employers, especially retail chains trying to offer the lowest prices. Simply put, in the face of this race to the bottom, it’s hard for those employers who want to do right by their workers to stay in the game.”

Home

“Few who have taken a two-day, round-the-clock, cross-country bus trip would relish the opportunity to relive the experience. You can’t shut out the constant drone of the bus, can’t get comfortable in the cramped seats, and can’t avoid the smells emanating from the restroom that runs out of paper towels on day one. Nobody on the bus wants to be there.”

“As housing prices plummeted and mortgages became harder to come by, fewer and fewer people were ready or able to buy a new home, while others who had lost their homes to foreclosure needed new lodging. Consequently, people who in another era might have owned their own homes flooded the rental market. As the number of people competing for rental units grew, the poor were increasingly squeezed by rising rents or pushed out of the rental market altogether, forced to double up or couch surf.

Yet it would be wrong to pin the inability of so many of today’s poor to find a stable home wholly on the housing collapse of the Great Recession. Doing so might lead to the conclusion that this is a temporary problem that will be alleviated in time. In fact, serious problems with the availability of affordable housing have been apparent for well over a decade. Already in 2001, 63 percent of very low income households were putting more than half their income toward housing, leaving too little for other necessities. As of 2011, that figure stood at nearly 70 percent.”

“Sixty years ago, lower-end housing was likely to lack such basic amenities as indoor plumbing. Since that time, these features have become standard, even in the cheapest units. This has been a great advancement for our society, but it also means that low-cost housing has become less affordable as a result.

Further, families like Jennifer’s are subiect to different rules today than they once were. In Chicago, as well as in virtually every other jurisdiction in the country, child welfare officials deem it inappropriate for a brother and sister to sleep in the same bedroom once they reach a certain age. At some point, if the authorities were to find out that Kaitlin and Cole were sharing a room, Jennifer would be at risk of losing custody due to “neglect.” By today’s standards of child well-being, Jennifer can’t move into a studio apartment to help balance her family’s budget.

The most obvious manifestation of the affordable housing crisis is in rising rents. Between 1990 and 2013, rents rose faster than inflation in virtually every region of the country and in cities, suburbs, and rural areas alike. But there is another important factor at work here that is an even bigger part of the story than the hikes in rent: a fall in the earnings of renters. Between 2000 and 2012 alone, rents rose by 6 percent. During that same period, the real income of the middling renter in the United States fell 13 percent. What was once a fissure has become a wide chasm that often can’t be bridged.

Very recently, a shift in supply and demand has made the crisis even more acute. Since the advent of the Great Recession, the number of extremely low income renters has grown dramatically — up by 2.5 million — while the supply of affordable rentals has remained flat. Because one-third of these low-cost rentals were occupied by higher-income renters, in 2011 only thirty-six affordable units were available for every one hundred renters with extremely low incomes. And most affordable units are older — usually fifty years old or more — and at heightened risk for disinvestment due to the costly nature of upgrades and repairs. It follows that they are the most likely to be deemed “substandard.””

“Today there are far more people in need of help with their housing expenses than receive it. Only about 1/4 of eligible families receive any kind of rental subsidy. In 2011, a smaller fraction of American renters received any sort of rental assurance from the government than was the case two decades earlier.”

“Families in $2-a-day poverty who must double up with friends or relatives sometimes find themselves in a perfect storm of risk for sexual, emotional, or physical abuse. They are often powerless, having little means to protect themselves. In addition, they are often already dealing with a crisis — the crisis that drove them to double up in the first place. Parents might be anxious or depressed, not surprising given the high levels of stress related to their housing instability. And they are more likely to be situated in networks that include children and adults who have themselves experienced abuse at some point in their lives, may struggle with alcohol and drug addiction, or may have mental health challenges.”

Strategies

“Selling plasma is so common among the $2-a-day poor that it might be thought of as a lifeblood. It is legal to “donate” up to two times a week, for which a plasma bank will pay you around $30 each time, $60 total. Jennifer Hernandez says she tried this for a while but gave it up because she couldn’t think straight afterward. She can’t afford to be off her game given her current circumstances.

In Johnson City, Tennessee, though, twenty-one-year-old Jessica Compton donates plasma as often as ten times a month – as frequently as the law allows.”

“Usually, it be during my time of the month that my iron really goes down.” Lately, the iron pills Jessica has tried haven’t been working. This terrifies her, because “donating” is the cash bedrock of the family’s finances right now. The phlebotomist in charge of the finger pricking has told her that “if the iron pills don’t help, [it means] I could be, like, anemic.” Anemics are barred from donating.

Today, like other days, she’s nervous. What will happen if she is not allowed to give plasma? The family desperately needs the $30. They’re now nearly three months behind on the rent. Travis often stands at the kitchen window of their cramped one-bedroom apartment as if transfixed – on the lookout for the sheriff, who might show up at any time to evict them.”

“Many among the $2-a-day poor bear these track lines — small scars from repeated plasma donations.”

“The [plasma] ritual takes roughly three hours door-to-door. Even so, the payoff is good, relatively speaking — $10 an hour.”

“Just prior to welfare reform, it took roughly $875 to meet such a family’s monthly expenses. But families could generally get only about three-fifths of that amount from cash welfare plus food stamps. To make matters worse, when a mother secured a job, she would lose about a dollar in welfare benefits for every dollar she earned. Yet she couldn’t afford to rely only on earnings from work in the formal economy. Work paid only a little more than welfare but cost a lot more in terms of added expenses for transportation, child care, health care, and the like. It was more expensive to go to work than stay on the welfare rolls.”

“What’s different these days — and what affects the $2-a-day poor so profoundly — is that welfare can no longer be counted on to provide a floor of cash that families can depend on. Back in the days before welfare reform, the strategies poor single mothers employed were hardly get-rich-quick schemes; they provided a few dollars here and there, often garnered with considerable effort. But when combined with welfare, plus a lot of old-fashioned frugality, these strategies usually allowed for a barebones survival. Today, families who find themselves virtually cashless have no such floor. If the $2-a-day poor were truly to make ends meet, they would have to find a way to generate double the amount their pre-welfare reform counterparts had to produce in addition to AFDC in order to balance their budgets. None among the families featured in this book have managed to come even close to this threshold, despite considerable effort.

The panoply of survival strategies used by today’s $2-a-day poor are variations on the same tactics poor families used a generation ago to get by: private charity, a variety of small-time under-the-table income-generating schemes, and plain old scrimping. Even those somewhat higher up the income ladder today, who have steady jobs or other steady sources of income, draw on such strategies from time to time when the money doesn’t quite stretch to the end of the month for one reason or another. But the degree to which people must resort to the riskiest strategies — those that can exact a sharp psychological, legal, and even physical toll — appears to be an order of magnitude greater for the virtually cashless poor than it is for poor families with some cash on hand.”

“Many shelters — in an effort to focus their mission — have strict parameters regarding whom they will help. Some take only women with children under age five. Others require attendance at religious services. Some require that you have recently lost a home, while others mandate a criminal background check. Some have terrific websites, while others are riddled with out-of-date information. Some you can only call, and others you find out about only through word of mouth. Thus, the search for a place to stay can take days of work. And let’s say that you finally find a place for which you are eligible and that happens to have room. To get to your new accommodations, you might find yourself traipsing across the city with all your worldly possessions, which is hard to do when you have no money.

Another dilemma faced by parents like Jennifer is that in the world of private charity, kids, and not their moms and dads, are often the focus of whatever aid is offered. Kaitlin and Cole both get regular dental checkups at various clinics and hospitals offering them for free on designated Saturdays. Jennifer is in serious need of a dentist, too, to care for her receding gums. Yet in the early part of the summer of 2012 (just as Jennifer was desperately searching for a job), the State of Illinois slashed funding for adult Medicaid services so that only emergency extractions were covered.”

“Families who substitute in this way aren’t breaking the law, not even close. They aren’t even doing anything unethical. They are simply reallocating some of the money they had been spending on food to other uses. Yet trading SNAP for cash — the most common strategy used for survival among the families in this book — is a crime, and a serious one at that. The reason the $2-a-day poor do so anyway is that the practice of substitution doesn’t work for them. They have no cash to spend on food in the first place. Meanwhile, the need to pay the light bill, or even get the kids new socks and underwear, can seem more compelling than the need to eat in a couple of weeks’ time. What’s more, it’s easier for a family with nothing to get food from another source — such as a food pantry — than to acquire those other things from charities. This is why food stamp “trafficking,” though rare among the poor more generally, is common among the $2-a-day poor.

What’s so magical about cash? Without it, your activities are restricted. Even if you are among the lucky few to be awarded a rent subsidy, claim government health insurance, and enroll in SNAP — even if you get every in-kind benefit our society might provide — you still lack the $20 in cash to buy an outfit from Goodwill to wear to that job interview, or to pay the bus fare to get downtown. Showing up at a job interview without the proper attire — maybe drenched in sweat after walking several miles on a hot Chicago day — sends the message that you are not taking the opportunity seriously.

Cash is what you need to wash your clothes at the Laundromat rather than in the bathtub at the homeless shelter you call home (assuming you’ve found a way to acquire some laundry detergent), leaving them to dry stiffly on the shower-curtain rod. Cash is what is required to purchase that new pair of shoes or backpack.”

“Astonishingly, at least in terms of the letter of the law, when Jennifer sells her SNAP, she risks a far longer prison term than the one José was subject to for molesting Kaitlin.

As a practical matter, it is far more difficult to traffic in SNAP than it once was. Back in the days when folks got paper food stamp coupons rather than electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards, they could easily trade the coupons for cash. But today’s SNAP card has your name on it and requires you to enter a personal identification number, or PIN, when you swipe your card at the register, meaning that in most cases you would want to be physically present at a fraudulent transaction. If you were to simply give someone your EBT card and PIN so that he could buy food for himself and then give you cash back, what’s to keep the person from using up all your benefits? Do you really want to trust someone with one of your most valuable assets, especially when you already know he is not above breaking the law?

In spite of these difficulties, there are other ways to barter SNAP for cash when the need arises. One relatively simple strategy is to find a family member or friend who will pay you back for groceries you buy on her behalf using your EBT card. Not all among the $2-a-day poor, can employ this strategy, for the simple reason that their relatives may be nearly as bad off as they are and don’t have any cash either.”

“According to Jennifer, the neighborhood is full of little bodegas that, from time to time, engage in SNAP trafficking. But the trade shifts from store to store so that owners can avoid detection. Luckily, Jennifer still has a few contacts in the neighborhood who are in the know and will tell her which store to approach.

The bodega owner will ring through, say, $100 in groceries and charge Jennifer’s card that amount. But instead of walking out with the groceries, Jennifer will get, say, $60 in cash. The chief beneficiary of the exchange is not Jennifer but the store owner, who pockets $40 in profit (his price for the risk involved in the exchange).”

“After decades of hardship, Paul came to own several pizza parlors beginning in the mid-1990s and enjoyed nearly a decade and a half among the middle class, But in 2008, after the restaurants went bust, there were several years when his family had no income at all to speak of. Scrapping has been one of the strategies Paul has used over and over again to bring in a few extra dotlars. “We save all our cans. So we get about sixty dollars [every time we go to the scrapyard]. That’s sixty dollars that would have been dumped in the garbage!”

Paul and his adult son Sam scan the sidewalks on garbage day and sometimes even snatch choice items out of dumpsters. When the pile in the backyard gets big enough, they take it to the scrapyard. Paul estimates that the current load in the backyard will fetch about $100.”

“More common is the trading of sex or sexual favors. In this scenario, a mom might seek out a “friend, probably a man she deems safe, or at least unlikely to get violent. It may be someone she knows from around the neighborhood, or maybe she met him in a bar and he bought her a few drinks. Either way, such a friend is probably not that hard to find. She might invite him home or maybe go to his room, and she might have sex with him or just “take care of him” in some other way. In return, he might pay her phone bill or part of her rent, or even let her and her kids stay with him for a little while.”

“A few months after this meal, after Modonna and Brianna were evicted from a shelter for failing to achieve self-sufficiency in three months’ time, they moved in with Modonna’s friend. Just days before Christmas, Modonna caught the man looking at Brianna in the wrong, way. When she tried to put her foot down, he responded by tossing Modonna and Brianna’s belongings out his second-story window onto the street. He showed them out the door and left them standing in the cold with no place to go, their possessions lying in a tangle around them. It took a full week for them to find stable quarters at a welcoming North Side Salvation Army.”

“The pizza shops weren’t Paul’s first business venture. From childhood, entrepreneurship was in his blood. When he acquired a telescope at the age of ten, he set it up right along the ever-busy Lorain Avenue, which traverses Cleveland’s west side, and charged passersby 10 cents to look at the moon. “That was a big deal back then! That was before any space program.” One night, he recalls, there were so many eager customers in passing cars that he caused a traffic jam. He also remembers with delight the summer night when he and his cousin Peter set about shining shoes, navigating one side of Lorain, all the way from 25th Street, in Ohio City, down to 150th, in Kamm’s Corners, then coming back up the other side. It had grown dark — the signal that it was time to go home — but the bars were still open. “We would go in the bars and shine shoes, work boots . .. We were just making too much money to go home — didn’t come back until two in the morning, and the whole neighborhood was up worrying . .. Everybody was drunk, so we’d get twenty dollars for shining their work boots! . .. I did that when I was under twelve . .. That was a special night.” At sixteen, while still attending high school, Paul worked in a local steel mill to help with the family’s expenses. One day, a large steel beam fell from above, severing his left foot. Even in those days, he had the perspective to know he was lucky — he could have lost his life. After his accident, he had to make his first prosthesis himself. “I made a cast, bought this liquid rubber,” and poured it into a mold. Later on, he made another cast from silicone, “before the industry was doing it that way.”

After several months of claiming workers’ compensation, he found that jobs were scarce for a man with one foot and only a high school diploma. Barred from factory work, he and Sarah, then newlyweds, moved to a farm in Amish country, where they got a free place to stay and modest pay working for a local farmer. There, under the farmer’s tutelage, Paul became a jack-of-all-trades, learning all kinds of skills to add to his entrepreneur’s tool kit.

When the farmer retired, Paul was able to parlay those skills into a job as a TV repairman at Higbee’s department store. When that trade went bust, he, Sarah, and the kids dipped in and out of poverty for several years as Paul worked odd jobs in construction while pursuing a college degree. Convinced that he would never get ahead without more education, he took a few courses at a time, selling plasma to put enough gas in his car to get to class.

College equipped Paul with the credentials that earned him a five-year stint selling and installing the latest medical imaging equipment in hospitals and clinics all around the world. He began traveling to places such as “Puerto Rico, Philippines, South America. I think I saw all but four [U.S.] states. New York! Nothing is like New York!” Paul loved the travel, loved seeing the world. He picked up quite a bit of Chinese along the way, plus key phrases from a half dozen other languages. But the job meant he was on the road constantly, and by 2004 he had traversed the globe long enough.”

“With the pizza business, Paul felt he was finally living the life he had dreamed of. Then came 2008. The economy tanked, and he “was losing five thousand a week at some of the stores.” First, he sold off the Sandusky location — the one hemorrhaging the most money — using the proceeds to pay back the franchisor what he owed for two of the three stores. The Giant Eagle grocery chain bought out the store in Amherst, but what he made from that sale was only enough to pay off the remainder of his debt on the pizza shops. The Lakewood site finally faltered when the street that it stood on was shut down for more than a year as part of a major road construction project.

Luckily, Paul came out of the fiasco with no debt owed to the parent company. But he wasn’t able to pay off the home equity loan. What’s more, his home’s condition had worsened considerably over the years, and the Cleveland real estate market had virtually collapsed. “Probably with the condition it’s in, it’s worth fifteen thousand, he says. “I’m stuck with a sixty-five-thousand-dollar mortgage on a fifteen-thousand-dollar house.” Although a government loan repayment program recently allowed Paul to cut his monthly payment from $700 to $250, he finds even that amount a stretch without a job.

The downside of a family business is that if it falls apart, everyone suffers. Paul had always been the one the rest of the family could depend on, but “between 2008 and 2010 ... there was a period there where I had no income.” Without any home equity to fall back on, he maxed out his credit cards. “I was borrowing from this one to pay that one. It was a mess.” Then “I cashed in my life insurance policy. I had an investment account from when I worked [for the medical equipment company]. I cashed that in.””

“In 2010, just as every resource he had at his disposal had been expended, Paul was finally approved for Social Security Disability Insurance. In 2009, he had been diagnosed with diabetes, and his bum leg (which caused chronic back problems) had grown too unsteady to support him for any length of time. Qualifying for disability ensured him access to public health insurance via Medicaid. But when Sarah was diagnosed with cancer in 2011, she had to undergo a year of treatment before she managed to get Medicare (a problem she wouldn’t face now, following the expansion of Medicaid in Ohio after passage of the Affordable Care Act). The medical bills accumulated. Paul keeps these bills stacked alongside his computer on his desk. They are nearly a foot high.

Little did Paul know that their trials were just beginning. In the spring of 2013, one son-in-law landed in jail. His pregnant wife (Paul and Sarah’s daughter) and their kids moved in with them. Their other daughter was evicted from her home after her husband lost his job at a muffler store. In Cleveland’s economy, where the unemployment rate exceeded 10 percent during the summer of 2013, it proved harder than expected for him to find employment, and she moved in along with her kids. One of his son’s ex-wives — with kids from several previous relationships — lost custody of all six of her children when she was hospitalized with terminal cancer. When child welfare came calling, Paul and Sarah took them in, too. Then their son Sam’s wife deserted him, leaving him with six young kids to care for, including three from her previous marriage. He had to quit his job and become a stay-at-home dad. Unable to pay the rent, he also landed at his parents’ home.

To say that the place is overcrowded would be an understatement. Sarah’s cancer has confined her to a hospital bed that takes up most of the dining room. The front room serves as a bedroom for four of the kids. The finished portion of the basement houses Sam and his six kids. Five more children and Paul’s younger daughter are stuffed into a tiny bedroom on the second floor (doubled up in two bunk beds and a single bed). Paul’s older daughter and her family are stashed in the tiny attic. “There isn’t a room other than the bathroom where no one’s sleeping.”

Even with Paul’s disability check coming in, with twenty-two mouths to feed, his household income has fallen below the $2-a-day mark. They tried but failed to get additional SNAP for the kids. The caseworker told them they had been denied due to the temporary nature of the living arrangements. Indeed, had the family been completely open about their situation when applying for benefits, the child welfare authorities might have come and taken the kids.

At one point, Paul fell far behind on the humongous water bills that started coming in. “[It] got up to $2,700 he says. The water was shut off for weeks, but he had “a friend we could go to with five-gallon buckets that was for clean water, dishwater.” Several times a week, the kids would pile in the back of the panel van, each with a bucket or two in hand, to travel the short distance to the friend’s home. There they would fill the buckets and set up a bucket brigade, passing them from hand to hand into the back of the vehicle. Then they would all climb in the van with the buckets for the trip home. For drinking water, “the boys would go to the neighbor’s.” For baths, sometimes “the kids would go to the pool and get their bath[s]” there. And to flush the toilet, Paul “took the gutter apart, rigged it up over the garbage can, and in just one rain we filled one big rolling garbage can, [toting it upstairs one bucket at a time, and] we used that to flush the toilet!””

“The unfinished part of the basement also holds the washer and dryer. When the water is on, Paul spends hours here employing a time-consuming conservation technique in order to save money on his water bill. “After it goes to [the] rinse cycle, I take the hose and fill up all these old laundry detergent bottles. That’s my next wash load. Then that rinse cycle becomes the wash water for the next load. Saves half the water bill . .. I fill it up, boom, boom, boom, boom! While I’m sitting down there, I can go through five laundry loads [with that water].” When the water wasn’t on, the washtub and clothesline in the backyard had to suffice.

“It’s good [everyone ended up here] in the summer, because if it wasn’t the summer, we would [have had] to do more inside,” Paul tells a friend, whom he has apprised of his situation. An eight foot folding table sits in the driveway on the right side of the house, surrounded by an assortment of plastic chairs. One side is flanked by the backseat from the van (you can get more kids in the van without that seat in it). At one end is a pink-and-green children’s picnic table complete with benches, which adds seating for an additional four. “I like it because when they spill their milk, you just hose down the driveway. Like five of ‘em generally spill their milk in a meal.” This strategy has a downside, however. “Somehow, we are a magnet for rats . .. Rats come from all over the neighborhood. They come out and sit right on the table ... I take my pellet gun, [and] we have fun using the rats for target practice out of my bedroom window!”

Beyond the dinner table and the big pile of scrap metal, much of the backyard is taken up by a garden that “grew from throwing out spoiling food — cucumbers, tomatoes, spaghetti squash ... All from the rotted vegetables. Any rotted potatoes we plant, then in November we have another crop of potatoes.” The garden provides fresh vegetables to supplement the canned goods, grains, and pastas provided by the food pantry. Survival for the extended family in Paul’s home requires that no resource be wasted and no asset go untapped.”

The Delta

“In Sunshine County, small cities of just a few thousand like Jefferson record poverty rates of well over 40 percent. Although the nation’s child poverty rate is high — about one in five children live in poverty — here the levels can be three times greater than that. In many of the smaller towns of only a few hundred folks, typical household incomes fall below $20,000, and the child poverty rate can surpass 65 percent.”

“Although Mississippi’s social safety net has always lagged far behind that of the rest of the country, AFDC was operational in the Delta by the mid-1960s. In 1970, the program covered only about 30 percent of poor children here, as compared to nearly 60 percent on average across the nation. However, that figure soon shot up as the court cases spurred by the National Welfare Rights Organization broke down discriminatory barriers that states had used to keep blacks off the rolls. By 1990, roughly half of the state’s poor kids were covered by AFDC. During those years, desperate parents with no other source of income could claim cash from the welfare office – cash they were entitled to by law And many did so. The state had a cash safety net, however modest.

Since the 1996 welfare reform, Mississippis TANF rolls have seen an astonishing decline, more so than in most other places. As of 1965, the program was serving 83,000 residents, and that number grew to nearly 180,000 at its peak. By 2002, however, the rolls had plummeted to only 40,000, and by the fall of 2014 the figure had fallen even further, to only about 17,000 statewide, around 0.6 percent of the state’s population.

In sum, Mississippi, like the rest of the country, is a place where the cash safety net has all but disappeared. This has paved the way for steep growth in the new poverty that has been documented throughout this book – households with children living on virtually no cash income. But what is distinctive about the Delta, along with other rural and semirural places concentrated in the Deep South and Appalachia, is that by the time welfare reform came along, with its new rules around work, opportunities for work had already virtually disappeared for those with low levels of education.

It is not merely the case that welfare reform and the accompanying changes left single mothers at the mercy of the perilous world of low-wage work, as it did in many places. Over the long term, work has been much less available here than it has been in most parts of the country, especially since the mechanization of agriculture. The unemployment rate in this central Delta county has been far above the national average for decades. This was true even during the historic economic expansion of the late 1990s, when the economic needle didn’t move here to the extent that it did in other parts of the country. In recent years, the rate of joblessness has been truly staggering. Halfway through 2014, more than 10 percent of adults were out of work and looking for a job (compared to the national rate of 6.3 percent). Most notable, at last available count, more than 35 percent of prime-working-age men were either unemployed or had left the labor force altogether, compared to the national average of just over 20 percent.

The cause of the economic free fall varies from place to place across the Deep South and Appalachia. While the collapse of the coal mining industry is the story in eastern Kentucky, mechanized farming techniques, including today’s high-tech, computerized tractors and combines, have allowed the agricultural industry to operate with only a tiny fraction of the workers once required in the Delta. Some of these machines are so fully automated that people say an operator can take a nap while his machine runs the length of a furrow. But it is also true that operating such a machine demands math and computer skills. Therefore, agriculture is not always a viable option for a high school dropout, especially one educated in the Delta, where many local schools earn a C, D, or F rating from the state.

Even among African Americans from around here with the skills to do these jobs, many recoil at the notion of toiling away in the same fields where their great-great-grandparents endured cruel forced labor. One local planter claims that the only way to get enough skilled and willing workers to plant, groom, and harvest his fields is to import them from South Africa. The wages he pays these college-educated guest workers for one planting season-roughly $8 an hour for forty to sixty hours per week — are more than they could make in a full year at home.

You might be able to claim a few hours at the Dollar General or the Double Quick convenience store, staples of many of these towns. There is the occasional Walmart or Kroger grocery store in the bigger cites, but they offer very few full-time positions. A small group of low-skilled individuals find work at municipal buildings or in schools (perhaps as cafeteria workers or bus drivers), but prison inmates are sometimes used for maintenance and janitorial services in these places. There are a few factory johs in some of the larger cities, the closest of which is a half hour away by car, but most people are too poor to purchase and maintain a vehicle. There are minimum-wage jobs cleaning hotel rooms at the casinos down the road — if you can find a way to get there. Yet even these jobs are harder to come by now. The casino business in the Delta has declined as competition for gamblers has heated up in the region. More and more casinos have sprung up near Memphis, the city where most of the people with real money in the Delta live. All told, the job situation in the Delta can quickly begin to feel hopeless even for the most earnest job seeker, espe-dally if she’s hoping for a full-time job.

The legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation remains thick in places like Jefferson. There are nearly always two sides to these small communities, one white and one black. One is marked by stately redbrick structures shaded by old-growth oaks and outfitted with manicured lawns, sprawling magnolia trees, and the omnipresent crape myrtle. The other side of town teeters. Its tiny wood-frame shotgun-style houses and decrepit trailers sit askew or have imploded altogether. Yards are choked with sunken-in garages, derelict appli-ances, and junk cars. Narrow porches are lined with old kitchen stools or broken-down living room chairs. Each time a car goes by, which isn’t that often, the air fills with dust. The stark contrast between the two sides of town isn’t new — it’s always been like this.”

“Many of the old main streets in these Delta towns, built up about a century ago, now sit virtually empty. Jefferson’s downtown still has some vitality to it, but just down the road lies another little town with an impressive cluster of red-brick buildings and streets that are utterly still, even on a weekday afternoon. In a third hamlet, a group of old black men spend their afternoons playing cards on the porch of a dilapidated former general store, just as they might have when the town was bustling. Here and there across the county, the carcasses of abandoned schools sit empty, windows busted out, rooflines sagging, lawns choked with weeds. In one, the sun shining in through the broken windows highlights a bird’s nest and several old textbooks strewn across the floor. In most of the cities and towns, there are large, empty, unsightly warehouses where cotton was once stored. King Cotton must now compete with the lowly soybean and ethanol-producing corn.

Health care in the Delta ranks among the worst in the nation. Some counties don’t even have an ambulance. One person reports that if you want to get your loved one to the hospital, you must drive to the county line and meet the ambulance from the next county over, which is hard to do if you don’t have a car. And despite high crime rates, some of the smaller towns lack a single police officer. All of these features impede the possibility of future economic growth. Businesses don’t want to locate in a place where the workforce has so little experience and so many prospective workers may be functionally illiterate. What firm could convince its middle management to move there?

These small Delta towns, along with other sparsely populated farm hamlets and derelict mill towns across the Deep South and Appalachia, contain a disproportionate share of the $2-a-day poor. Locales like the Delta have long been among America’s poorest places-stops on the ‘poverty tours’ of generations of politicians — due to economic travails evidenced generations ago.

If legitimate means for getting cash — from either welfare or employment — have become increasingly scarce, the infrastructure necessary to earn cash in the informal economy isn’t much in evidence either. There are no plasma clinics to be found, and only a few scrapyards in the region’s biggest cities. Private charity, which is in greater abundance in rich cities such as Chicago, is noticeably absent here, and many of the public spaces are in disrepair. For the residents of these little towns, the nearest food pantry is often miles away, despite the sky-high poverty. Jefferson’s public library, crafted from an abandoned railroad depot, has only a few worn best sellers and a couple of computers on hand. Not surprisingly, you may find it empty even on a weekday in those prime hours just after school, and it’s often closed due to the lack of funding.

When the new poverty of those living on $2 a day meets the old poverty of long-term economic stagnation, a whole region can become starved of cash. In places like the Delta, the bite of $2-a-day poverty is experienced on a community level. Under these conditions, a subterranean economy can spring up in place of the formal one, intricately interweaving the lives of the $2-a-day poor, the just plain poor, and even those slightly higher up the economic ladder. This shadow economy springs forth in living rooms, in parking lots, in the checkout line at Kroger, and even inside the legitimate businesses that have managed to survive. At its best, it forges bonds of interdependence that inspire the slightly better-off to aid those who are struggling in ways that speak to the marvel of human goodness. But at its worst, when the new poverty meets the old, it warps human relationships and puts those at the very bottom of society in a position that is ripe for exploitation.”

“Aside from the crowded trophy table, Marthas apartment is neat and clean, but noticeably bare. There is only a love seat and a couch, and the dozen or so family photos hanging on the wall (some shellacked on antiqued wooden boards) — neither the clutter nor the decor one might expect in a household with two teens and a baby. What stands out most is the wooden dining table that separates the kitchen from the living area. The table reveals Martha’s method for surviving on virtually no legitimate source of cash other than the $150 a month in child support she gets from Candace’s father. On it, she has neatly arranged an assortment of snacks, some in woven baskets. The offerings are modest — a dozen bags of chips, some cherry- and grape-flavored suckers, a few other varieties of candy. Inside the refrigerator’s freezer, though, there are dozens of Dixie cups filled with Kool-Aid Popsicle sticks taped into place so they stand straight up. All morning, Martha has been checking to see whether the Kool-Aid inside has frozen hard enough to ensure that the sticks will stand upright minus the tape.

At about 10:00 a.m., the first customers come by. A dad wearing a white tank top. jean shorts, and white sneakers is looking to treat his two daughters, about six and eight years ald. The fify-cent Dixie cups he hoped to purchase for the girls still haven’t frozen. There are some dollar size pops in Styrofoam cups left over from yesterday, but he has only $1 and two eager gids, so he’ll have to come back in about an hour. Over the next thirteen hours, a similar ritual is repeated over and over again. People knock at the door, and Martha shouts for them to come in. Sometimes parents accompany their kids, sometimes the kids come on their own. Most leave with a special treat.

Martha’s business model is simple: buy in bulk, sell for roughly twice the price. Nothing in her store has a sale price of more than $1. The frozen pops yield the highest profit — all they require is Kool-Aid mix, Popsicle sticks, and a supply of Dixie and Styrofoam cups. In the summer, when the neighborhood kids are around all day, she diversifies her inventory some, offering Kool-Aid pickles (Martha’s secret recipe: add Kool-Aid mix to the pickle juice, let the pickles marinate for two or three days, and serve) and pickled pigs feet. If she’s feeling ambitious and has the supplies, she may offer chitlins, too, the local delicacy made from the small intestines of a pig.

In the bare-bones Delta economy, Martha Johnson has devised a survival strategy that trumps most others in the vicinity, both in terms of the cash it yields and in the lack of a toll on self-respect. In keeping with the biblical parable of the talents, rather than bury her proverbial treasure in the ground, Martha invests the SNAP she receives for herself, her two daughters still at home, and her six-month-old grandchild into a small capitalist enterprise that allows her to provide a minimally decent life for her family in the face of highly precarious financial circumstances. She’s spent a decade building up her business, one frozen pop and bag of potato chips at a time.

For Martha, cash is an absolute necessity of life. Her biggest bill is for the utilities, which run about $250 a month on average.”

“A good day at the store yields $20 in profit for thirteen hours of work, an hourly wage of less than $1.50. If she has a good day every day for an entire month, her proceeds can reach $600, in reality, though, she usually nets only about $400.”

“Like many of Jefferson’s residents, Martha does not own a car, and there are no buses or public transportation of any sort. There is also no place in town to buy groceries, just the Double Quick, the Dollar General, and a tiny restaurant and general store. To acquire products for the store, she must travel to a larger city a twenty-minute car ride away. For transportation, she relies on “Miss Clark,” a neighbor lady who lives down the road. On these outings, their first stop is the local butcher, who sells snacks in bulk, as well as pigs feet and chitlins. Then they are on to Walmart or Kroger.

Dorothy Clark is one of the Delta’s just plain poor, kept well above $2-a-day poverty by her goverment disability check, yet she still struggles to raise her three children. She supplements her disability by using her van as a gypsy cab. Miss Clark’s neighbors keep her busy driving back and forth to “town.” Passengers pay their $30 fare in cash or SNAP. Occasionally, she drives folks around for free due to an abundance of Christian charity. Martha, a fellow churchgoer and close friend, is often the beneficiary of her generosity. Without Dorothy Clark’s kindness, the profit margin of Martha’s store would be perilously low.

Others in the taxicab business are a bit more hard-nosed. Up in the hamlet of Percy, a town of about three hundred a few miles away, Loretta Perkins uses her “little raggedy car” to transport folks where they need to go, but she never fails to charge a fee. “Nobody even gets in my car unless we go right to the gas station and they fill up the tank with gas,” she says. She is available every day but Tuesday, which she calls “National Highway Patrol Day,” due to the high number of patrol cars on the road that day of the week. Miss Perkins never drives on Tuesdays because she has no license plate for her vehicle, no insurance, and no driver’s license.”

“Here everyone knows everyone else, so finding a business partner who’s got some cash but no SNAP is often as simple as going next door. In the typical exchange, those with cash get their groceries for half price. The going rate for a dollar of SNAP is just 50 cents here, rather than the 60-cent rate in places where far fewer folks are involved in trafficking. Those trading SNAP for cash may not be happy about the exchange rate, but with so much SNAP and so little cash in the local economy, it is a buyer’s market.

Up in Percy, Alva Mae Hicks is raising ten children under the age of eighteen, plus she has three more who are a little older. She worked on and off as a hotel maid for several years, taking a shuttle van to Greenville each day. For the past decade or so, she hasn’t held a job. These days, she couldn’t possibly afford child care for all her kids, not to mention that the fee for the shuttle to work now costs $15 a day, a quarter of her potential gross pay. With such a large family. Alva Mae has to go above and beyond selling SNAP to have any chance of keeping her household going Just this past year, she struck on a new strategy that may help fill the gap a little.

With no job, Alva Mae can’t take advantage of the refundable tax credits that the federal government uses to buttress the wages of low wage workers. While she may not be employed, she does have relatives a few towns over who are, but they don’t have any children whom they can claim as dependents. She also has family over in Jonesville — just a hop, skip, and a jump from Percy — whose kids are grown. Recently, one of her relatives offered to buy one of her kids’ Social Security numbers for $500. Alva Mae then sold two more to other kin, reaping $1,500 in cash for her household — which currently contains twenty-one people. These relatives can “carry” the child whose Social Security number they purchased as a dependent on their taxes and collect the refundable tax credit for which neither they nor Alva Mae is eligible. Last year, Alva Mae used the proceeds from these transactions to buy a used car — mostly so she could visit the food pantry in a nearby town. This turned out to be a poor investment. Just two months later, the car broke down, and Alva Mae has no money to fix it.”

“It’s hard to put any kind of pressure on Salvatore when he controls one of the town’s three remaining businesses, plus virtually all of the rental properties around town. According to one resident, “He own [sic] Percy. There’s maybe only four or five houses that somebody actually owns here. About ninety percent he owns.”

Salvatore rents out a set of generations-old sharecropper shacks he’s hauled from the field and plunked down by the main highway. Each has been repaired to some degree, but according to one former tenant, the insides still smell of decades — maybe even a century — of decay. You can rent one of these places for about $200 a month. For as little as $150, you can move into one of Salvatore’s collection of barely inhabitable mobile homes, some lacking any source of heat. These shacks and trailers form a ragged necklace around the intersection that marks the entrance to town. Their condition makes the weed-eaten, derelict Section 8 development where Alva Mae Hids and Loretta Perkins live seem desirable by comparison.

The other two businesses in Percy are run by relatives of the Salvatores.”

“Kitty-corner to the diner is Valentine’s General Store. Its white proprietor was mayor of Percy for nearly thirty years before losing an election to a black man who used to sweep his floors. Valentine’s sells hot dogs, sandwiches, sodas, chips, cupcakes, and Ding Dongs at lunchtime. Loaves of Wonder bread sit on the shelf ready for purchase. Anyone using SNAP here must beware, though. Some locals say that if purchasers aren’t paying attention, the Valentines may add a little something extra for themselves when they ring through groceries on SNAP cards.

Of course, if someone were to catch Mr. or Mrs. Valentine cheating them out of their food stamps, they would have little recourse. Percy has no police force. Such an offense probably wouldn’t even register with the county sheriff’s office, which has plenty of violent crime to deal with. Some years ago, Percy town officials tried to hire a semiretired cop from a larger town nearby to patrol the streets part-time. According to one local resident, after just one night on the job, the new hire called an emergency meeting with the city council to ask, “What part of the law do you want me to enforce?” Reportedly, the officer claimed that if he were to enforce the law in full, he was quite certain that most of the town’s residents would be imprisoned by week’s end. After getting some guidance from the council, he went back out on the streets for a second night. The next day, he quit.”

“Though it’s nothing like prostitution, Martha Johnson’s little store, for all its virtues, is still an illegal enterprise. Every time she purchases inventory using her SNAP card, she commits a crime. Not revealing her ‘income” to the housing authority, not to mention the IRS, is also a crime.”

“Standing in front of the stove in her mother’s kitchen making macaroni for her younger siblings, Mr. Patten knocked on the apartment door. She was holding a baby in her left arm, resting on her hip, Another baby sat in a nearby high chair, and a toddler was asleep on the couch. Six other children, all younger than Tabitha and all separated by about a year in age, hovered around the stove, waiting for their meal, Alva Mae was out running errands, and Tabitha was in charge of the house, What a time for her teacher to show up! “I was embarrassed, because there are a lot of kids, and I was trying to cook and I was cleaning, and I had the baby on my hip, and I told my little brother to answer the door, and he came back and said, ‘Hey, there is a white man at the door! I was like, ‘Who that?’ And I went to the door, and it was Mr. Patten!”

By the time of this visit, Tabitha had been evading her teacher’s request to come to the house to meet her mother for quite some time. “He kept saying he was gonna come ‘cuz my grades [were bad], he wanted to meet my mom, and stuff like that. I kept making excuses, like, ‘My mom stay gone! She gonna be out of town. She don’t ever be home!’ And he showed up at the house and she was gone and I had the baby on my hip. I didn’t want to let him in!”

Eventually, she opened the door, and to Tabitha’s surprise, within minutes all of her younger siblings had warmed to Mr. Patten’s presence. “I let him in, and he was, like, totally comfortable. He sat on the couch and he played with the kids, and it was, like, different! The kids was loving him, jumping on him, he was playing with them and stuff like that! And he was talking to me about getting my glasses. I couldn’t (see the blackboard). Talking to me about [if that’s] why I wasn’t focusing in class and all that. He talked to me about what I wanted to do in life . . . I kept thinking he was going to stop talking to me because I was babysitting — my mom had all them kids! I thought he was going to think I didn’t have no potential in me.”

Never before in Tabitha’s memory had a white person crossed the threshold of their home. And this particular white person acted in a way that was totally contrary to expectations. “Well, living in Percy, it’s some Caucasian people but it’s not a lot. And the ones that we have, they’re basically, you know . .. They look at you like the kids is nasty!”

Tabitha had learned what to expect from white folks from her interactions with the owners of Percy’s general store. She says, “They can be friendly sometimes, but it’s only if you can be showing them that you have, like, an education . .. They don’t call [my brothers ] by their name . .. They say ‘Hey boy’. .. Like he’ll say ‘boy,’ and my brother, he’ll say, ‘My name is Stephen.’

Despite years — even generations — of knowing one another, precious few pleasantries are exchanged between the white folks and black folks in town. To eleven-year-old Tabitha, this made Mr. Patten’s behavior completely enigmatic. “So I came home [with my glasses], my mom, everybody was happy and stuff. And then it was, like, [Mr. Patten and I] got closer because he started taking the kids to the dentist and stuff, the eye doctor, all my other brothers and sisters! It was, like, he was there for everybedy! Like we’d tell him about our problems, like even my mom called him sometimes. It’s not normal for [someone like] him to be that close to our family!” Further visits by Mr. Patten revealed that Tabitha’s nearsightedness was only the tip of the iceberg. Poverty was like a millstone around his young student’s neck. The most obvious manifestation of this poverty was in the extreme overcrowding. After giving birth to five children by Tabitha’s father — who moved to Biloxi to work on the oil rigs just after Tabitha was born — Alva Mae fell for a much younger man about the time Tabitha turned three. Cliff, who was only sixteen to her twenty-six, was a brutally abusive drug addict who worked as a farmhand for a local planter. He wielded nearly complete power over Alva Mae. She gave birth to eight of his children in almost as many years. By the time Tabitha had turned ten years old, there were thirteen children at home. Over the next few years, several of the older children left, formed families of their own, and then bounced back at regular intervals due to money troubles, sometimes bringing their kids or lovers with them. Although Cliff has been ordered by the court to pay child support of $107 a week, he does so only sporadically. Other than that, Alva Mae and the kids see none of his money. Cliff is cruel. His own children loathe him. He has been known to beat Alva Mae until her face is covered in blood, and he manipulates his family in ways clearly calculated to cause deep psychological wounds. He has an official address elsewhere but is often in the home.

Between Tabitha’s sixth- and ninth-grade years, only Alva Mae and ten of her thirteen children had the legal right to live in their government-subsidized apartment. At times, however, up to twenty-four people could be found packed into the unit. “It’s a three-bedroom apart-ment,” Tabitha says. “So it was very hard, because … basically you slept wherever you wanted to lay your head. Some of them slept on the couch, some of them slept on the floor. Eight of us slept in the bed. But there’s like only two beds in the house. So it was really hard. My mother, she would put the covers over us. She would set us in the bed. Like, she had to put the bed against the wall for more support. She just pack us all into the bed. We just lay straight. We try not to complain, because, you know, basically we see our mom going through this and it’s painful, it’s depressing to her, and then we don’t want to bring it to anyone’s attention.”

Mr. Patten had rocked Tabitha’s world just by caring enough to show up at her home one day and then by arranging trips to the eye doctor, as well as medical and dental appointments for her siblings. Then he and a couple of other TF teachers organized a spring break field trip to Washington, D.C. ‘My first time out of the Delta. First time out of the Delta, I went to Washington, D.C. It was a lot of us that hadh’t been out of the Delta. It was, like, the majority of the school. It was only fifteen of us [that got to go], and it was so exciting and I was so happy . . . My mom was kind of skeptical. ‘What? You going out of town with those white men?’ They trusted [them], but they was still [nervous].’

As they prepared to leave for the nation’s capital, the teachers learned that hardly any of the children had more than one change of clothing, underwear, or socks. A trip to the nearest Walmart — with funds from a few generous donors — provided the provisions needed to get the kids through the week they would be away. Tabitha had even less than the rest. “That was stressful, ‘cuz I was, like, everyone gonna judge me, and I was, like, I didn’t want anyone to know that we didn’t, like, have clothes or anything Because, like, what my mom said, What goes on in the house stays in the house. We … didn’t really have no clothes, just wore the same uniform over and over again . .. Basically, that was normal to me. Not that it was normal and I was happy or anything like that. I knew that it was not a good thing, but I was so used to it!”

The trip was the highlight of Tabitha’s young life. “It was so exciting. We were on an airplane! Saw the White House, the Washington Monument ... It was so cool because a lot of white people actually were the ones would talk to us.” It was a shock to have white folks addressing her and the other kids in a friendly manner. Also on this trip, many of the children saw an elevator for the first time. Initially, some of them didn’t believe that the box behind the doors could actually transport them from one floor to another. They honestly thought it was some sort of joke that the teachers were playing on them.

At the end of the trip, a strange melancholy fell over the band of sixth graders. As they boarded the plane, “everyone was so mad at Mr. Patten ‘cuz we was, like, You take us all the way out here, you show us this, and then you take us back to the Delta where there’s nothing?” Once they were back home, it would be back to waking up every day, not having enough food, sleeping with seven of us, it was, like, seven, eight of us in the bed and the rest of them on the floor. And sometimes a week or two we go without the lights, and then just the feeling, like, you’re just starving.”

What does it feel like to be that hungry? Tabitha pauses, then says, “Well, actually, it feel like you want to be dead. Because it’s peaceful being dead. Going through seeing your little brother and them, you know, wake up crying, and then [them saying] they don’t want to go through this anymore . . . And then my mom, she saying she don’t want to go through this anymore. It’s like really hard because you wake up some days in the dark. And just go for two weeks, three weeks [without lights, heat, or air-conditioning]. [When] stamp day rolls around again, [my mom] sell the stamps and that’s how the lights get back again.”

Tabitha spent her seventh-grade year, the year after the D.C. trip, hungry. Same with her eighth- and ninth- grade years. Finally, in the tenth grade an opportunity arose. Her gym teacher messaged her on Facebook and said he had been watching her for years, waiting for her to “mature.” “Since you were real young,” he wrote. He wanted to meet — in secret — at his house after school. He promised food.

Tabitha was deeply conflicted about the teacher’s offer. What if accepting it meant that she might finally be able to sleep at night without gnawing hunger pains, afraid that if she moved to clutch her empty stomach, she’d be evicted from the bed she was sharing with seven siblings, forced to sleep on a rug she knew had been fished out of the Dumpster? What if going along with the gym teacher meant she would finally be able to concentrate in school? She was so afraid of disappointing Mr. Patten. Maybe she could even sneak some of the food she was given into her backpack so she could stop her four-year-old brother from crying himself to sleep at night.

Tabitha’s dilemma was made worse by the fact that in Percy, conventional morality is often turned upside down. Most grown-ups in this little town claim to be God-fearing; you can almost take that for granted. But what was Tabitha to make of the fact that Mr. Valentine, the store owner who called her brothers “boy” just to show he could, was the town’s former mayor, its chief public servant? How was she supposed to think about the fact that her next-door neighbor, who attended the local Baptist church and sang in the choir, was also known to walk the half mile to Salvatore’s on a Friday (payday for the farmhands) whenever her family was really desperate to get the power back on? After socializing for a while, she would disappear into a beat-up truck with some guy, the two of them heading off down the road. Forty-five minutes later, the truck would roll back into the parking lot, kicking up dust as it came. She would reemerge from the passenger side, straightening her hair and rearranging her clothing. Once more, twice more, as often as it took to make sure the light bill got paid.

How was Tabitha supposed to come to terms with the fact that it was a teacher — a man in a role she had been taught to respect — who was the one offering her special attention in the form of sex after school in return for a full stomach? If a teacher said it was okay, could it really be so wrong? Besides, could she say no to a teacher?

Tabitha shudders, recalling the liaison that lasted seven months. “He said he had been watching me. Watching me! Since I was young! Like I was meat! He was watching me all that time.” Finally, Tabitha, fraught with guilt, sought out Mr. Patten, who was no longer teaching at her school but had chosen to stay in the area after his stint with TFA was done. She told him what was going on. She blamed herself. Mr. Patten tried to convince her that a sixteen-year-old could not consent to a sexual relationship with a grown-up, especially a teacher.

Acting on his instructions, Tabitha reported the gym teacher to the county attorney and the high school principal. At first, nothing happened. Finally, after Mr. Patten insisted, the teacher was removed from his post, although they gave him other work at the school. To date, there has been no criminal prosecution by the county attorney. In fact, there has been no response from his office at all. Tabitha has four sisters under her who will go to the same high school. The thought of this man claiming another victim from among them keeps her awake at night.

Alva Mae and her ten children living at home constitute the “official” SNAP assistance unit. She gets $1,600 in food stamps each month, but she has no cash to pay the utility bills (electricity, water, and sewer), to buy clothing, and so on. In a climate where the temperature has ranged from 9 to 109 degrees in just the past six months, it is clear that electricity is essential to heat and cool the apartment. The thirteenth of each month, when the family’s SNAP card gets replenished, always feels celebratory. But with bills that can only be paid with cash, the relief is short-lived. When asked how much of their monthly SNAP gets sold, Tabitha says, “She sell enough to get the light bill paid. So if the light bill comes to three hundred dollars, she take … enough out to get three hundred dollars left over.” (At the Delta’s going rate, it takes $600 in food stamps to yield $300 in cash.) Then “whatever other bills she has [she’ll sell more]. But the food stamps don’t last because of it.”

Somehow, this serious-looking young woman, now eighteen, has been able to see the larger picture and feel moral indignation rather than resignation. Her weight, still so low, is a testament to what it has cost her and her brothers and sisters to live for so many years among the $2-a-day poor. When asked how long the food each month lasts, she says, “It only last a week or two — maybe a week and a half, if we eat one meal a day … The kids, they so, they so, emotional [about it]. My little sister in the room, and she just crying. My little brother in the room, and he just crying, like, it’s sad . .. They cry because they compare their life to someone else. Like, a lot of my little sisters and brothers and them say they wish they wasn’t alive. And it’s sad because when my [older] brother died . .. I remember my little brother and them breaking down, and . . . my little brother said, I wish I was Mike, too. I wish I was dead.”

When Tabitha was sixteen and her older brother Mike was twenty-two, he went to visit their oldest sister, who was in the army and stationed in Knoxville, Tennessee. One Saturday, “he and his friend decided to go [cliff diving]. Well, we seen the video. They [made] a video ‘cuz they was just having fun. It’s [a place] on a river . .. that used to be a park. But [in the river], it was rocks or something on the bottom.”

At this point, Tabitha pauses, lowering her voice as if revealing a secret. “I think he’s happy. I know he’s happy. That’s what I tell my little brother and them. I just don’t want for them to feel that they should go there. That they should do something to hurt theyselves. Me personally? [I think he did it on purpose.] Yes. ‘Cuz in the video he went to a corner and he prayed. In the video, [his friends] say, ‘Hey man, what you doing over there praying and stuff?’ And he put his hands together, he say a prayer and he just run and jump off, and his body just float. And you see it, he had a white shirt on. He just was gone.”

One might think that her brother’s death or her liaison with the gym teacher was the low point of Tabitha’s young life. But according to her, that moment had to do with Cliff. It came in the fall of her junior year. Alva Mae and Cliff were fighting, and Tabitha intervened to protect her mom. ‘I jumped in it like I always do. I jumped in it, and then I was like, ‘You’re not gonna hit her, not in front of the kids, because the girls gonna think, you know, that’s how men love them, is to take a hand to them’ ... Then he pushes me, [holds a gun to my head], and says he’s gonna kill me.”

With the attention drawn off her and onto Tabitha, Alva Mae fled to Salvatore’s, with Cliff following in pursuit as soon as he realized she was gone. Tabitha and her siblings trailed behind him at a safe distance, intent on protecting their mother. At Salvatore’s, several patrons had to pull Cliff off Alva as he tried to beat her to a bloody pulp. After the fight was over, Cliff presented Alva Mae with an ultimatum. Tabitha says he told her mother, “You need to make a choice, me or [Tabitha]. Before tonight, one [of] us is leaving. ‘And [my mom] was like, Well, Tabitha, what do you think about staying with your friend for a while?’” Tabitha’s mother had chosen Cliff over her. “And I knew at the time what she was saying. So I just broke down and started crying.” Now Tabitha was virtually homeless. Mr. Patten found a boarding school in Memphis that had scholarships and helped her apply. By January, when she was first interviewed for this book, she was living in Memphis, with her own bed to sleep in, only one roommate, and three meals a day.

Her struggle isn’t over, though. “When I’m alone, I’m thinking about [home]. Well, then it’s kinda hard. Well, it is hard. ‘Cuz then, when I call my mom and [say], like, ‘What you doing,’ and just to hear the pain in her voice?” She says, though, that “every time I look in my little sisters’ and brothers’ eyes ... they’re proud of me, like if no one else is proud of me, I know my little sisters and brothers [are] proud of me. That’s why I said, when I graduate, my mom don’t have to come, [but] every one of my siblings have to be there. They have to be there. Like, if one of them just don’t come, like, I would be sad . .. Like it would be a waste of time. Like I want them to see me graduate. But the scary thing is that I’m scared what if I don’t make it in college? Like, my sisters have always seen other kids who get up and fail. That’s why they don’t want to get up, because they always seen someone fail. I tell them, ‘You got to get all As and Bs!’ and they say, ‘Why get all As and Bs and I fail this test?’ In the house we so scared of failing. I’m scared about failing. When I care about something, I give it my all. I care about going to college.”

Conclusion

“Three of the parents who appear in this book have a child who has attempted suicide. Another — Tabitha’s older brother Mike — may have successfully ended his life. Yet another, only age nine, is being treated with antipsychotic drugs because he threatened his sister with a knife. Two of the girls whose families we describe have ended up selling their bodies in exchange for food and money. One had to be treated for multiple sexually transmitted diseases at age fifteen. Certainly, this is too high a price for children to pay.”

“In the 1990s, President Clinton and Congress acted on Elwood’s ideas and bolstered the well-being of working-poor parents dramatically through tax credits that provided a substantial pay raise in the form of a wage subsidy. The largest of these programs, the Earned Income Tax Credit (BITC), is now generous enough to lift more than 3 million children above the poverty line each year. Millions of struggling working families have been made much better off as a result of these changes, a triumph of social policy.

Elwood’s conclusion — that welfare must be replaced, not just reformed — was based on a crucial insight — any program so out of sync with American values was doomed to fail. He made the case that four values were especially important: the autonomy of the individual, the “virtue of work,” “the “primacy of the family, and the “desire for and sense of community.” The old welfare system was portrayed, if unfairly, as supporting the opposite — indolence and single parenthood. Because of this, Elwood argued, virtually everyone disliked the program. Many hated it — even many of its claimants.

An unintended consequence of abolishing AFDC has been the rise of $2-a-day poverty among households with children. But though welfare reform may have been the cause of this increase, reverting to the old welfare system is not the answer. The flaws of that system were too deep. Elwood’s basic premise remains as true today as it was twenty-five years ago: any response to the rise in $2-a-day poverty must be in line with America’s values. This is not merely an argument about political feasibility. The primary reason to strive relentlessly for approaches that line up with what most Americans believe is moral and fair is that government programs that are out of sync with these values serve to separate the poor from the rest of society, not integrate them into so-ciety. The old welfare system had the virtue of providing a floor of cash income for those in need, but it exacted a heavy price. To be a welfare recipient was to wear a scarlet letter in the eyes of your fellow Americans. The old welfare system separated its claimants from the mainstream. It may even have created a class of outcasts forced to trade their sense of citizenship for relief.”

“It is not enough to provide material relief to those experiencing extreme deprivation. We need to craft solutions that can knit these hard-pressed citizens back into the fabric of their communities and their nation.

With this in mind, we propose a radical returm to the central idea that was behind the 1996 welfare reform: work opportunity is vital and must be at the center of a multipronged strategy to help the $2-a-day poor. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 — welfare reform — delivered on the personal responsibility.” It ended widespread reliance on cash welfare. But for too many, it failed to deliver on work opportunity.

Our approach to ending $2-a-day poverty is guided by three principles: (1) all deserve the opportunity to work; (2) parents should be able to raise their children in a place of their own; and (3) not every parent will be able to work, or work all of the time, but parents’ well-being, and the well-being of their children, should nonetheless be ensured.”

“The solution is a robust program of job creation — one that goes beyond anything America has undertaken since the Great Depression.

Government-subsidized private sector job creation is one way forward. Recently, the federal government sponsored a promising short-term subsidized jobs program through something called the TANF Emergency Fund. States that chose to participate were allowed to use TANF dollars to provide employers (mostly in the private sector) with incentives to hire unemployed workers, targeting those on TANF or those who were in a spell of extended unemployment. Each state was given considerable leeway to design the program however it saw fit, often in close collaboration with employers. Across the District of Columbia and the thirty-nine states that took part in the program, employers created more than 260,000 jobs with an investment of only $1.3 billion dollars. Roughly two-thirds of participating employers said they created positions that would not have existed otherwise, and the businesses that took part expressed, on the whole, eagerness to participate in such a program in the future. Further, many participants remained employed after the subsidy ended, and those who had experienced significant trouble finding work especially made gains. Researchers who studied the program noted that it garnered “strong support from employers, workers, and state and local officials from across the political spectrum.”

Creating a subsidized jobs program modeled on the TANF Emergency Fund would be one way to improve the circumstances of America’s $2-a-day poor. These individuals tend to be at the end of the hiring queue for a multitude of reasons and would likely benefit from en approach targeting workers who have the greatest challenges finding work. A program that included some support services could be particularly effective. In Michigan, a program called Community Ventures not only helps place individuals in jobs but also goes further by providing a set of services that make it easier for workers to stay in those jobs, such as assistance in arranging transportation or child care in a pinch. Imagine if Rae McCormick had had a resource like this when the truck had no gas and she couldn’t find a way to get to her job at Walmart. Including a caseworker who can counsel workers when conflict arises or advocate on their behalf might make a program like this especially valuable. What if Modonna Harris had had someone to advocate for her when her cash drawer came up $10 short, or if Jennifer Hernandez could have gotten counseling about the laws governing overtime work and pay when she was working double shifts at Catalina? Perhaps her family’s sojourn to Texas could have been avoided. Such work support programs could even be paired with mental health services. With the routine and structure that job provides, and with access to quality mental health services, it seems possible that Jennifer and Rae might be able to really get a handle on their mental health challenges.

Some argue that stimulating private sector job growth doesn’t go nearly far enough. Harvard economist and Clinton treasury secretary Larry Summers predicts that among working-age American men, one in six could be out of a job due to changes in technology even when the economy has fully recovered from the Great Recession. If that trend continues, he says, in a generation a quarter of middle-aged men will be out of work at any given moment.” Economists Carl Frey and Michael Osborne of the University of Oxford estimate that jobs are at a high risk of being automated in nearly half of all occupational categories. If these predictions are correct, the seemingly endless hunt for work won’t just be the lot of the $2-a-day poor; many in America will be joining them.

If that is the case, we need to think bigger. Much bigger. If the private sector isn’t up to the task of producing enough jobs, one could make a strong argument that government itself ought to create a substantially larger share of the jobs than it does now — jobs like those provided by the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. Certainly, there is ample work to be done in our communities. The nation’s infrastructure is badly out-of-date in many places — often crumbling, sometimes downright dangerous. The National Park Service and state and local park districts are underfunded; this limits hours and upkeep. Safe, stimulating day care centers — the kind of environments our toddlers and preschoolers require to thrive — are too few. We need many more after-school programs for school-age children. There are too few tutoring programs. There is too little elder care. Our public libraries, pools, and recreation centers — vital institutions for the safety and well-being of our children — sometimes limit their hours due to lack of funding. Trash litters our rural byways and our city streets. There is a widespread need for treatment centers for the chemically addicted and shelters for the homeless. There is enough to do.”

“Policy proposals aimed at improving conditions for low-wage service sector workers include provisions for minimum or guaranteed hours — perhaps thirty-five hours per week for full-time workers and twenty-five hours for part-time workers. Policy makers would have to look hard at how to design these regulations so as not to tie the hands of workers and firms too much. But a rule that could make an immediate impact would be one requiring employers to post schedules at least three weeks in advance. More predictability at work — and in the family’s finances — might bring more stability to the lives of those who otherwise might be prone to fall into $2-a-day poverty.”

“Casting a bright light on poor working conditions, and on their consequences for parents and kids, may catalyze the public’s approbation, and there’s evidence that it could lead to real change. In 2014, the New York Times reported on the deleterious impacts of Starbucks’s “just-in-time” scheduling practices on one mother of young children. The resulting uproar compelled the chain to pledge that it would revise its procedures. In the early months of 2015, Walmart announced that it would raise wages for its associates to $10 per hour by 2016 and change its scheduling practices so, that workers will get at least two and a half weeks’ notice of their shifts. These changes appear to have been spurred at least in part by public criticism over the low wages the company offers and the precarious schedules it often imposes on workers. Could drawing more attention to such practices create a race to the top among low-wage employers, especially as the labor market tightens? The nation needs an index of retail firms that offers information on how each one treats its low level workers — pay, working conditions, scheduling practices, the proportion of employees working full-time — that consumers can use to make decisions about where to shop.

Can firms afford to treat their workers better? New research shows that when workers are treated well, they work harder and more productively, delivering value to investors and customers alike. Fewer things get misshelved or priced incorrectly, both major sources of lost profit in the retail sector. When workers are treated better, they might in turn treat customers better, too, leading to more sales. Market Basket, a successful grocery store chain operating in New England, starts employees off at $12 an hour and offers health insurance and paid sick leave to everyone. Wegmans, another regional grocery store chain, QuikTrip convenience stores, and Southwest Airlines are all profitable while treating their employees well. Each firm differs, but as a group they tend to pay higher-than-average wages, rely more heavily on full-time workers, employ more stable scheduling practices, offer more fringe benefits, and invest in their workers through on-the-job training. And their workers seem to perform better because of it.

What is different about these firms — and there are far too few — is not just the pay, hours, or benefits. Market Basket employees say that their CEO, Arthur T. Demoulas, makes it a point to know his employees by name. He attends their weddings and funerals. When he was fired by his board of directors in a turf battle over control of the family-owned company, workers went on strike in protest. They weren’t risking their jobs for increased wages or benefits. They were risking their jobs for their boss.”

“Another creative option for informal entrepreneurs like Martha are the small business “incubators” that have sprung up all over the country helping to formalize the “brown” — informal yet not illegal — economy. A food incubator, for example, might provide access to a professional kitchen that’s up to code, allowing Martha to produce her Kool-Aid pickles and market them on grocery store shelves.”

“Clearly, a few million additional government rental subsidy vouchers would help. In addition, there is a place for investment in the building or rehabbing of more affordable housing. There’s actually already an underutilized mechanism in place at the federal level that could help with this — the National Housing Trust Fund. The NHTF is supposed to act as a pot of money that could be tapped by states to help support the building of affordable housing developments. Yet the recent housing crisis derailed efforts to fully fund the NHTF, and the federal government has yet to build the program up. One idea to fund such an initiative is to limit the home mortgage interest deduction on mortgage values above a certain level, perhaps half a million or a million dollars, in effect shifting a subsidy away from very wealthy families to some of the very poorest ones. Another possible avenue to increase the stock of affordable housing and decrease residential segregation is to reduce the prevalence of discriminatory “exclusionary zoning” regulations.”

“A family with a full-time earner making $15 an hour can afford a two-bedroom apartment at the fair market rent in twenty-two states and can come very close in another four.

Interviews with landlords of low-income renters in three cities offer at least anecdotal evidence that these investors factor in the job and income instability of their prospective tenants when setting rents. If a landlord anticipates that she’ll be able to collect rent in full and on time for only two-thirds of her tenants, she may factor that into the prices she charges. In the summer of 2014, some landlords with units in the tougher sections of Cleveland said they could count on getting only about 50 percent of their rents paid on time in a given month. Most attributed the problem to the unstable earnings of their tenants. Even if some tenants might pay up eventually, in other cases the landlord will have to forgo rent for a month or more while evicting the current tenant and finding a new one. If these considerations do indeed factor into rental prices, it follows that ensuring work opportunity might well provide benefits that trickle up to landlords, allowing them to make apartments available at lower prices.

Government housing subsidy dollars could be redirected to cover more eligible households if a greater number of families with housing subsidies earned more. Currently, subsidized renters must put 30 percent of their net income toward rent. Researchers found that roughly 45 percent of non-elderly, nondisabled housing subsidy holders reported no earnings in 2010. What if even one-third or one-half of these households instead earned net incomes of even $15,000 a year? The total savings could conceivably reach into the billions. If these dollars could then be reallocated to alleviate the housing burdens of a greater proportion of the poor, the United States would make even more progress toward closing the gap between income and rents.”

“In many cases, a relatively small infusion of cash might be all it would take. Since most families work, perhaps something called a “family crisis account” might be built on top of the EITC — something that families could tap a finite number of times over a given period to help them bridge the gap during a crisis. Credits could be earned with work effort and banked until needed. The key would be that families would be able to access these resources quickly, in a pinch, without having to cut through too much red tape. One idea is to provide those claiming the EITC the option to “save” some of their refund — to have it disbursed at intervals throughout the year rather than in a lump sum at tax time — and offer them incentives to do so. That way, when families hit a rough spot or face a sudden crisis, they have a self-made safety net to draw on.

Providing the ultimate safety net is the role that Temporary Assistance for Needy Families is supposed to play, but it hasn’t proved to be up to the task. Part of the reason TANF isn’t doing its job is that it is a block grant given to the states, which have broad flexibility as to how they spend the money. This means that they have plenty of reasons to keep families off the rolls, because if they do, they get to use the money for other, related purposes. Of the $16.5 billion the federal government transfers to states for TAN, more than $11 billion is siphoned off for other uses, sometimes to fund a state’s child welfare system. Strained state budgets are thus eased. TANF has become welfare for the states rather than aid for families in need.

Beyond eligibility rules and other formal restrictions on who qualifies, there’s evidence that some prospective applicants may be “diverted” from applying for aid in unauthorized ways. After nearly a year without employment, a desperate Rae McCormick swallowed her pride and finally took a trip to the welfare office to apply for TANF. She says she was told, “Honey, I’m sorry. There are just so many needy people, we just don’t have enough to go around.” Rae’s visit to the welfare office is not the only evidence of this kind of behavior. In Georgia, one study found suggestive evidence that the state welfare commissioner’s oft-repeated phrase, “Welfare is not good enough for any family,” may have led caseworkers to actively discourage families from following through on their applications.

Rather than providing short-term aid that families can gain access to quickly in a pinch, TANF offices in nearly every state require applicants to jump through numerous employment-related hoops before they can be deemed eligible, including attending an orientation, making an employment plan, registering for employment services, or engaging in hours of job search activities. For those who do manage to get on TANF, stringent work requirements must then be met — typically thirty hours a week of work for a private employer or at a community service job — the latter in return for only a couple of hundred dollars’ worth of benefits each month. Ironically, this work may put them no closer to finding a “real” job.”