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The Working Poor Invisible In America Analysis

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Carelessly, the working middle and the high class people always forget about what the poor working class has to do in life to survive. In a passage from the novel, The Working Poor Invisible In America, David Shipler compares the poor working class wages to the amount of food they are able to buy. Shipler is able to creatively inform the audience using description, exemplification, and cause and effect what the life a poor working class citizen does everyday. David Shipler shapes an image in the minds of all of his readers with his selective word choice. As a result of not having the money to pay for food, parents are forced to let their children starve, and as a result those children start looking “listless”. Shipler uses “listless” to show how severe the life for the young kids are. The image Shipler is going for by calling the kid’s “listless” gives the impression that the kids life is dull and lifeless. …show more content…

The passage begins with Shipler explaining what is a fixed amount and what the flexible parts of a budget are. Things like “rent” “car payments” “electricity” and “telephone services” are all fixed amounts. A person is able to determine how much money they want to spend on all of those things. However, food, “food is one of the few flexible parts of a tight budget”. To provide for a bigger family, a person would need more money than a family of two or three. However, how much a person pays for food is paid for by “whatever cash is left after the unyielding bill[s] are paid”. Usually a poor working class citizen, will not have much after the bills are paid. The bills that the poor have to pay for their families “can soak up 50 to 75 percent of a poor family’s earnings”. This leaves these families with very little money to pay for their food. They now have a flexible amount of money to pay for food, but the amount that they have may not be as

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In David Shipler’s book “The Working Poor: Invisible in America” starts out describing what Earned Income Tax Credit is it’s a program to help people in poverty who are either liberals and conservatives. Providing a significant source of income once a year to help your down payments on a car, house, bills, debt, or other taxes. It seems to be a good program, but some government businesses sometimes mislead their claims and denying others access to certain benefits or rights. Certain people who have a hard time doing their taxes seek help, but tax prepares may charge high interest rates and fees to just use their services. For example, Evon Johnson who had a tax charge from the IRS for over $2,072.

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My article deals with the study of society and social interaction of the Middle Class and how they survived on a Nickel and Dimed. In our text (n) 2, (pg. 42, paragraph 2) the journalist Barbara Ehrenreich brought the two stories together by research, that it is, impossible to make it on minimum wage work. The journalist observed in her study the mindset of the working Middle Class people, their persistence to make ends meet, to take care of their household, family and the will to make thing change. The “Middle Class” an aimless expression applied to those who is not on the system of welfare. In the United States certain development changed the past three decades, due to after World War II, the benefits of growth, and money making flow to

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Incorporating such commentary is effective in this study because it elucidates the struggles of the working class that are often unnoticed or avoided by the mainstream middle-class society. Her intentional use of satire and sarcasm challenges her middle-class and educated audience to alter their perspective towards low paying jobs and their workers. By enveloping herself into the marginalized society of the working class, she exposes the audience to the elements of low paying jobs that would not be witnessed by anyone besides employees. Ehrenreich expresses a voice of judgement towards her new coworkers to reflect the common misconception of failure that the middle-class holds towards low paid workers. This strategy enables the reader to reassess poverty and which aspects of it must be focused on in the frequent discourse of impoverished

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527 Words | 3 Pages

Pathos dominates the article when Ehrenreich allows her nephews mother in law, grandchildren, and daughter to move into her house. The situation focuses on pathos because in Ehrenreich’s personal story she includes that “Peg, was, like several million other Americans, about to lose her home to foreclosure” (338). She is effective in her writing by appealing to the readers’ emotions through visual concepts and personal experiences. When I read the article, I felt emotional because the working poor are not fortunate to know if they will have a house or food the next day. I agree with Ehrenreich in which the poor are as important as the wealthy group who get more recognition.

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Jack Nguyen AP English 3 30, July 2015 Nickel and Dimed Rhetorical Strategies and Notes Thesis: Ehrenreich’s personal use of varied rhetorical strategies allowed her to divulge the working conditions and struggles of the poverty-stricken class to the readers in order to provoke them to realize that something has to be done about poverty.. First Body: What: Allusion Pg. 2, Logos Pg. 37. How & Effect: Ehrenreich uses these personal, rhetorical strategies based on her experiences as a low-wage worker in the poor working class. The effect is that Ehrenreich is able to show the readers the conditions in which the impoverished work in and the daily obstacles that they face in life; also there is an appeal to logic and a reference of a poverty idiom. Why: Ehrenreich is deliberately using these rhetorical strategies to incite the readers about the fact that changes need to be done to poverty because it is a detrimental thing to society.

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Few have college degrees” (Johnston, K. 2014). Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of Nickle and Dimed, left her life as a journalist and became one of the so called working poor (Ehrenreich, B. 2001). In this paper I will discuss the main issues in the first half of her book, I will explain what theoretical perspective her work fits into, how she did her research, the strengths and limitations to her approach, and describe how the American economy may look to a low wage worker. Main Issues First I will discuss some of the main issues Ehrenreich writes about in the first two chapters of her book Nickle and Dimed.

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The prices of food are ridiculous. The prices are not reasonable for the amount of food that you receive. Minimum wage jobs do not pay enough so a parent can do everything that they need to do. You will make enough money to pay for priority bills and whatever is left is what you will get. “Talk of parents who go hungry themselves so their children can eat , who put off utility and phone bills so they can buy food.”

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“Someday, the capitalist system will disappear in the United States, because no social class system has even eternal. One day, class societies will disappear” - Fidel Castro. Peter Singers’ “A Solution To World Poverty” is viewed as a drastic way to end world poverty. Barbara Lazear Aschers “On Compassion” makes the reader understand that it is okay to help the lower class. Singer and Ascher have contrasting viewpoints on social class, particularly on donating money and the willingness to save a lower class citizen.

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In the article “How I Discovered the Truth about Poverty” Barbara Ehrenreich gives her view in poverty and explains why she think Michael Harington’s book “The Other American” gives a wrong view on poverty. She explained that Harrington believes that the poor thought and felt differently and what divides the poor was their different “culture of poverty.” Ehrenreich goes on to explain on how the book that became a best seller caused so many bad stereotypes on the poor that by the Reagan era poverty was seen as “bad attitudes” and “faulty lifestyles” and not by the lack of jobs or low paying jobs. And they also viewed the poor as “Dissolute, promiscuous, prone to addiction and crime, unable to “defer gratification,” or possibly even set an alarm clock.”

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The idea of being poor in America was not in the minds of everyone. In the suburbs Americans thought that America was an affluent society. The poor were left in the city and lived on poor conditions. The poor are locked in a cycle where they do not have many opportunities to thrive rather they are more likely to be set back by illness. It was important to expose how poor the people living in cities could be, now that the middle class could help support the poor.

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In the memoir “The Glass Castle” by Jeannette Walls, she, and her siblings live in extreme poverty because of their unfit parents, Rose Mary and Rex, who struggle or lack interest in getting a job. Rose Mary and Rex are unfit to raise four kids because they are both immature and lazy with regard to their parenting. An act of immaturity Rose Mary and Rex shows is when they refuse to receive any forms of federal aid or grants, “Although we were the poorest family on Little Hobart Street, Mom and Dad never applied for welfare or food stamps, and they always refused charity. When teachers gave us bags of clothes from church drives, Mom made us take them back. ‘We can take care of our own,’ Mom and Dad liked to say.

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I know how hard is it to find a decent job. Many occupations wont take applicants unless they have experience in a demanding and skilled environment. If a ready to work American went out to find a job, they would be out of luck because they don’t have the needed requirements and will never have them because they can’t get hired, in other words it’s a new ending loop of not having the requirements that will never be gained in the first place. After reading this novel, I also understood the true meaning of American poverty and what is it to be “poor”. The novel also revealed to me the difficulty of the less fortunate, and the free flowing lives of the people who didn’t get thrown in the never-ending loop of poverty and despair.

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946 Words | 4 Pages

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In the passage “What is poverty?”, the author Jo Goodwin Parker, describes a variety of things that she considers to portray the poverty in which she lives in. She seems to do this through her use of first-person point of view to deliver a view of poverty created by a focused use of rhetorical questions, metaphors, imagery, and repetition to fill her audience with a sense of empathy towards the poor. The author’s use of first person point of view creates the effect of knowing exactly what she is feeling. “The baby and I suffered on. I have to decide every day if I can bear to put my cracked hands into the cold water and strong soap.”

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Social inequality is overlooked by many. It affects so many of us, though we have yet to realize how extreme it is. Lee argues in this novel how much stress social inequalities put on the black and white races throughout the 1930s. Although, social inequalities did not just affect different races, it also affected poor people and family backgrounds. These are proven in the novel multiple times through Boo Radley, Tom Robinson, and the Cunninghams when the book is looked at more in

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