The Working Poor Invisible In America Analysis

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.

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