$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

The opening pages introduce us to Susan Brown, a woman who lives on the South Side of Chicago with her husband, daughter, and three other family members. They live together in a crumbling three-bedroom house with little more in their refrigerator than a small amount of baby formula. The neighborhood was once comfortably middle class with plentiful stable jobs—but then the jobs dried up, and the drugs and the violence moved in. Susan and her husband, Devin, have had little success in finding work. Without an income, they are too destitute to move away.

Susan and her family are just one of the roughly 1.5 million American households who survive on an income of less than $2 per person, per day. A welfare reform in 1996 dramatically reduced the cash assistance system, replacing it with a safety net that is designed to serve the working poor. People like Susan would like nothing more than to have a full-time job paying a living wage, but there simply aren’t enough jobs for everyone who needs one. When a low-wage labor market is combined with a lack of cash assistance for the unemployed and underemployed, the result is $2-a-day poverty.

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