For class this week, I and my classmates were asked to investigate how much money a single parent of two children would need to survive in a month, and to compare this budget to their income if they were working full time at a minimum wage job. While I was not surprised to find that a basic estimate exceeded this income, I was shocked by how much higher even conservative estimates on the sources I found were. Before I began to renegotiate what I felt the family could do without, the budget I planned exceeded the income by over $700.
Even worse, I found that there were costs I had note even considered, or others I had assumed would not exist. While I, and my classmates, were eventually able to develop a plan to survive on minimum wage, for each of us, success depended on support from organizations or theorized friends and family which in actuality could not be counted on. My answer for far too many necessities was “I will get that free from [insert organization here]”, but in real life the level of support from nonprofits and other agencies cannot be guaranteed. Personally, I find the fact that an individual could not survive on a minimum wage budget without a great deal of luck and sacrificing of what the more fortunate would consider necessities to be unfair. While I acknowledge that there are some legitimate concerns about raising minimum wage, the entire point of its existence is to ensure that everyone who works can survive, and at this point, I believe that the experiment we conducted proves that the current minimum wage does not meet that standard.

Many people prefer to place the responsibility for poverty or homelessness on the individuals. While they are not necessarily unsympathetic to their plight, they often blame the poor for their situation. I myself have seen examples of these attitudes in Redlands. For my capstone project last semester, I surveyed the people of Redlands regarding their attitudes on panhandling. Many, though not all, of the respondents suggested that the homeless were more than capable of changing their situation if they tried. Some examples of these responses were as follows:
“…a lot of the homeless people don’t want to change”
“They just want to live on hand outs and do their own thing and not better themselves.”
“…majority of people that are homeless choose to remain so”
“…they lack the drive to pick themselves up, work and earn their keep.”
Yet several of the readings for this week, especially Nickel and Dimed and This Is Why Poor People’s Bad Decisions Make Perfect Sense, do a great deal to combat the idea that escape from poverty is simple. Alongside discussing the exhaustion and struggles the working poor face, Ehrenreich shows that many of the people she encounters want to escape their circumstances but are trapped. Those in the cleaning service she works in, for example, might be able to increase their pay if they went on strike. However, they cannot afford to go without a paycheck for the time it would take to force a change. In This Is Why Poor People’s Bad Decisions Make Perfect Sense, Tirado argues that for those in poverty, “the very act of being poor means [they] will never not be poor.” She points out that many people like her cannot have a bank account, which limits their ability to obtain housing, or other necessities. She shows that many positions require employees to look good, but the image required to obtain said job cannot be maintained without it, and that things which those in more privileged positions view as free, are not for those who must face the hidden costs head on. The descriptions of the sacrifices these individuals make, and the hard work they do simply to maintain their existence, does much to discredit the misconception that poverty is a symptom of laziness. Often, the poor are forced to make decisions which keep them in poverty, simply because they have no better alternatives.