The Poverty Line
One person family: $10,890
Two person family: $14,710
Three person family $18,530
Four person family: $22,350
14.5% of people live below the poverty line, meaning that 49 million Americans live in poverty. Are all these people choosing to live like this? Well 16.2 million of these people are children, who legally cannot work, and cannot change their circumstances, so they are not choosing to live in poverty. This still leaves 32.8 million people below the poverty line. 10 million of these people are mentally ill, and cannot work, so they aren't choosing to be poor. Now we are left with 22.8 million people living in poverty who could be choosing to live that way.
If you are living in poverty and are not a child or mentally ill, the only way to get out of poverty would be to get a job, yes? Well minimum wage doesn't reach above the poverty line. And guess what! We need people to work these low income jobs in order for this capitalistic society to work. As long as we have these big corporations, we will have jobs to fill and people who will take them.
But the question 'is poverty a choice' is flawed. No one makes one single decision that leads them to poverty or wealth for that matter. Its a series of choices, that can take you down different paths depending on the situation you were born into. If you are born into a family living below the poverty line, and choose to work full time at a minimum wage job, you might not make it out of poverty. But someone born into an extremely wealthy family could choose never to work a day in their life, and they would never know what its like to go hungry for a day.
The fact that this question is even asked, shows that we live in a First World Country. Nobody in the slums of Afganistan or Democratic Republic of the Congo is questioning wether they choose the life they live in. Do we as Americans even know what its like to be poor?
