SOCIAL INEQUALITY AND PREJUDICE- A GROUND UP PERSPECTIVE OF BEING POOR IN AMERICA

The poor and working class citizens in this country have been your work horses for far too long! We have been blamed for the root of all problems and the cause of the entire economy’s lack of progress. The Welfare State needs to end. Does it, now? Let’s look at this from a different perspective, let’s call it Citizen Street View.
First, let’s take the issue of taxes into consideration. For every person who earns 26k, around 21$ goes to food stamps. To understand the inequality a little better, you must understand a little about the credit ‘tier’ system and tax brackets and their effect on the American people. There are certain rewards for making more money, like credit and loans that aren’t usually extended to the lower classed citizens. Its costs more to be poor than it does to be rich. Explain? Kindly! If the same person making 26k doubles his salary to 52k, would his payout to SNAP double as well? NO! It’s around 29$, a mere 8$ more. As the salaries increase beyond that, the tax rate at which earnings are taken for social services decrease. Essentially, this means that the poor are paying for themselves.
It is a common misperception that poor people do not work and are on drugs. That may be so in some cases, but not all. The lower classed citizens, working poor and welfare recipients do not get the same offers in housing or schooling as our rich counterparts have become accustomed to. Without luxuries like cars and cell phones, we are forced to shop at convenient locations within our traveling reach. Usually at a higher markup than your Wegmann’s or Whole Foods. Our substandard living falls in urban areas designed for the lower wealth population. Unfortunately, these are also the areas that are targeted for gang recruitment and drug sales. People in these areas eventually cannot help but to fit the prototype of a person on welfare. Some find themselves in a downward spiral because environmental and societal stressors cause a person to seem to ‘need’ more. When it comes to job search in today’s America, technology plays a big part in obtaining employment. People on assistance are treated as 2nd class citizens. We do not deserve computers, smart phones or nice clothes. We are supposed to miraculously find jobs in a hard hit economy and then a find 2ndone to afford the cost of living in it.
Many social services have a work requirement, SNAP being one of them. GA, or general assistance, as well as TANF are temporary programs. While some may phase onto the disability track, the ultimate goal is self-sufficiency. This is hard with a system that uses income guidelines placed by the federal government and not by state. As soon as someone starts to work, many services are terminated immediately, without a proper transitioning into the functioning society. There is no case management or contingency plan in place. The more money we make, the more taxes are taken out, until the next tier is reached or tax breaks are offered. It is very deterring when we live in a society in which 70% of our gross earnings go to the cost of living and 17% is taken for taxes. This causes many people to return for services when faced with the aggressiveness of economic slavery.We work harder in longer shifts to supplement our loss of income through taxation. The more we make, the less services we become eligible for, the less services we become eligible for, the further into debt we go.
Welfare recipients shouldn’t have certain things, according to an opinion shared by many. Does it really bother you that I care about my appearance that I spent 20$ for my nails? Or went to Walmart and got myself some costume jewelry for 8$? I work 40-50 hrs a week. Rewarding ourselves helps add to our self-esteem. It boosts our esteem which boosts our focus, our productivity is raised in the workforce as a result. We are less inclined to notice the inequality in the world when we are happy with ourselves. Going to school raises confidence and leads to better opportunities. A person on welfare is believed to not ‘need’ a car or a cell phone. Some social service agencies give bus passes, however those that do not also do not consider the cost of one into expenses. We are told that the Safe Link ‘Obama’ phone with 250 minutes a month is enough, and then get told we are beggars when we run out of minutes and our job searches are halted. A person can render themselves useless without communication to the outside world. And when their case worker happens to call and they do not have a working phone number, the first of the month will bring on a onslaught of problems that isn’t conducive to self-sustainability.
We are a class of citizens without a voice, ill represented and underappreciated. For over a century, we have been funding the wars and the bailouts and taking the blame for the rest society’s entitlement issues. Our opinions do not matter. We are supposed to accept it and pay our taxes! There is no one for us on Capitol Hill taking a stand against the gaps of inequality. Our congressmen and senators are bred into their positions, they talk about the struggles with the economy and the GDP and the unemployment rate instead of creating jobs and stopping the outsourcing of American infrastructure. We now have to welcome the ‘new poor’ as the scales of wealth take a shift due to this crisis. The well never seems to run dry when it comes to the salaries of our politicians and their exclusive benefits only when it comes to the people sector of the government; austerity is always the first choice for expense cuts.
What happened to no taxation without representation? The working poor can basically stop paying taxes, because the rocket scientists on Capitol Hill are not representing us accurately. What do they have in common with us? Have they ever felt struggle or debt at great magnitude? They represent a populous, to which I am not part of and society has cast us out of. The middle to upper class Americans that are complaining about the economy won’t complain about their tax amnesty or their fringe benefits and corporate kickbacks. It’s going to take a loud cry from a silent class of citizens to change this.
America has become an economic battlefield. The distribution of wealth in the country is from the bottom, up. Its about time we wage the right war, like, the war on poverty, the war on homelessness , or the war on hunger in America. A different perspective needs to be understood. The opportunities are not as readily available as many would like to assume. The process for social services is harder than you think and believe it, or not, many of us aspire to go to college and get off of these services. Unfortunately, many people in the lower classes do not have the good credit or the means to build it without being able to have a car or a cell phone, which is against the rules placed by society. The system is therefore, keeping us down by not allowing these luxuries to us. The stereotypes are hindering our economic growth and on a personal level its insulting to think that your 40 hours of work are more important than mine.
We don’t want any hand outs, we want a hand up. A change in policy allowing us the simple luxuries in life would suffice. One that allows us to utilize modern necessity, like, cell phones and internet. We are not greedy in asking for a living wage, but maybe we are going about it all wrong. Maybe we should ask for fairness and equality in taxation and make the rich pay just as much as the poor.