Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Challenging Homelessness, Elizabeth D. Marshall

SURGE

I had been homeless for about 28 hours. I sat on a sidewalk in Georgetown with a friend holding a cardboard sign that read, “Put a Smile on Our Faces” with a Dunkin Donuts cup at our feet. In the two and a half hours we sat there, hundreds of people passed, hundreds of people avoided eye contact, hundreds of people detoured around the lamppost on the street side of the sidewalk. A few people glanced at our sign. [excerpt]

Poverty Knowledge, Coercion, And Social Rights: A Discourse Ethical Contribution To Social Epistemology, David Ingram

David Ingram

In today’s America the persistence of crushing poverty in the midst of staggering affluence no longer incites the righteous jeremiads it once did. Resigned acceptance of this paradox is fueled by a sense that poverty lies beyond the moral and technical scope of government remediation. The failure of experts to reach agreement on the causes of poverty merely exacerbates our despair. Are the causes internal to the poor – reflecting their more or less voluntary choices? Or do they emanate from structures beyond their control (but perhaps amenable to government remediation)? If both of these explanations are true (as I …

Milking The System: Do Poor People Deserve Fresh Food?, Melanie M. Meisenheimer

SURGE

Poor Americans are all lazy, selfish people who must first prove their worth as human beings if they want to be able to feed their children.

It sounds harsh, stereotypical, and judgmental when you put it like that, and few people would feel comfortable saying that exact phrase. However, it’s a perception of poverty in America that I’ve found still has a strong grip on our way of thinking. [excerpt]

Not Quite Out On The Streets: Examining Protective And Risk Factors For Housing Insecurity Among Low-Income Urban Fathers, Colleen E. Wynn

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

It has long been acknowledged that housing is essential for access to employment, social services, healthcare, and other forms of assistance that help move people out of poverty. Through identifying dimensions of housing insecurity, policymakers, as well as researchers, will have a better understanding of the protective factors that make families more secure and the risk factors that raise their level of insecurity. These analyses use resident and non-resident, low-income, urban fathers’ responses to the five publicly available waves of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing (n = 4378) dataset to examine the relationship between protective and risk factors and …

Correlates Of Hunger: Evidence From The Community Based Monitoring System (Cbms) Data Of Pasay City, Frumencio F. Co, Rechel G. Arcilla, Shirlee R. Ocampo

Angelo King Institute for Economic and Business Studies (AKI)

Hunger is one of the major problems in several countries, and the objective to reduce it has become a global concern. A major initiative of the United Nations Millenium Development Goals (MDG) is the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger. However, the attempt to reduce the abovementioned issues, calls for proper identification as to who the impoverished and hungry are. There are several ways to identify the poor, but pinpointing who the hungry are, is another task.

State Level Earned Income Tax Credit’S Effects On Race And Age: An Effective Poverty Reduction Policy, Anthony J. Barone

CMC Senior Theses

In this paper, I analyze the effectiveness of state level Earned Income Tax Credit programs on improving of poverty levels. I conducted this analysis for the years 1991 through 2011 using a panel data model with fixed effects. The main independent variables of interest were the state and federal EITC rates, minimum wage, gross state product, population, and unemployment all by state. I determined increases to the state EITC rates provided only a slight decrease to both the overall white below-poverty population and the corresponding white childhood population under 18, while both the overall and the under-18 black population for …