Selling plasma to survive: how over a million American families live on $2 per day

David_42

Registered Democrat.
Aug 9, 2015
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This is disturbing, I did not expect this.
Selling plasma to survive: how over a million American families live on $2 per day
In early 2011, 1.5 million American households, including 3 million children, were living on less than $2 in cash per person per day. Half of those households didn't have access to in-kind benefits like food stamps, either. Worst of all, the numbers had increased dramatically since 1996.

Those are the astonishing findings Johns Hopkins' Kathryn Edin and the University of Michigan's Luke Shaefer discovered after analyzing Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) data in 2012. In the intervening years, Edin and Shaefer sought out Americans living in this situation, with basically no cash income, relying on food stamps, private charity, and plasma sales for survival.

The result is $2.00 a Day, a harrowing book that describes in devastating detail what life is like for the poorest of America's poor. I spoke with Edin and Shaefer about the book Friday; a lightly edited transcript follows.

How people get by on $2 a day or less
4606397617_d48bdd5670_o.jpg

US Department of Agriculture

A farmers market that accepts food stamps — which many of the extreme poor lack access to.
Dylan Matthews
How did you set about finding people living on $2 a day or less?

Kathryn Edin
Before we even went to the numbers, I was doing fieldwork here in Baltimore in the summer of 2010. I kept noticing that more and more families we were coming across didn't seem to have any means of cash income.

Initially I had kind of thought, "Maybe these people are just living on non-cash benefits like SNAP [Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program/food stamps] or housing subsidies." That's really different than it was before welfare reform, when a lot more people were claiming cash from the welfare program, but I thought that at least they would be claiming some level of protection from the government nonetheless.

But not only were people not getting any cash from TANF [Temporary Assistance to Needy Families/welfare], in many cases they weren't getting non-cash benefits either. What we saw when we went to the numbers was that although some were getting food stamps, and a few were getting a housing subsidy, half were living outside of the in-kind safety net as well. That was pretty shocking.

The other thing that shocked me was the magnitude of the problem. Over the course of a year about 3.2 to 3.4 million kids experience at least three months in $2-a-day poverty.

Luke Shaefer
So it started with the qualitative insights, and then we moved to the survey data for confirmation, and then we wanted to see if we could find more families like this in different places. We started setting up field sites and would hang out at food banks and emergency food distributors. We'd post flyers at family homeless shelters, since the book is really about families with kids. And then we recruited research collaborators who had strong ties to some of the communities that we wanted to recruit sample members from.

104161743.jpg

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Volunteers prepare meals for homeless and impoverished people at the St. Anthony Foundation dining room on September 16, 2010, in San Francisco.
Dylan Matthews
How do families making $2 per person per day get by? How do they get housing and food?

Kathryn Edin
One thing that's interesting about the population is how diverse it is. It's racially and ethnically diverse, it's regionally diverse. You see both married and unmarried couples in this situation.

Being precariously housed or homeless is not ubiquitous, but it's close to ubiquitous. In terms of survival strategies, we documented the importance of the charitable sector and vital public spaces like public libraries. But we also show that these are disproportionately available in places with the most overall resources. There is a lot more available from the charitable sector in Chicago than there is in the Mississippi Delta.

"THE PEOPLE WE TALKED TO WOULD COMMONLY HAVE A SCAR ALONG THE CREASE OF THEIR ELBOW, FROM SO MANY NEEDLE PRICKS FROM GIVING PLASMA"
TWEETSHARE
Another common strategy we saw was cashing out food stamps. This is not something the poor typically do, and I want to emphasize that, but in the world's most advanced capitalist economy, you gotta have cash. When it comes time to pay for the kids' underwear, or to buy a school uniform, you're gonna do that. Families have a very intense moral dialogue about that. They feel it's wrong and only do it in certain circumstances. It really leaves them hungry at the end of the month, though, since food stamps never come in a surplus, and they only get 50 to 60 cents on the dollar, depending on the region they're in. It's a ripoff for them and for the taxpayer, and really exposes the family to hardship.

Beyond that, there's selling plasma. You can only do it a couple times a week, and it can leave you physically debilitated. You make about $30 a time. It's fascinating sitting in front of the Cleveland Plasma Clinic, watching busload after busload of people get off at the bus stop, and the entire bus walks right into the plasma clinic. Scrapping [collecting and selling discarded metal] was the other common survival strategy that we documented. It doesn't pay well if you're only using a grocery cart, which is what most of our families are doing.

Luke Shaefer
Across the different field sites, the people we talked to would commonly have a scar along the crease of their elbow, from so many needle pricks from giving plasma. It sort of looked like a track line. It pays relatively well, but they do it so much that it's leaving a physical mark.

Some were selling sex. Sometimes it was for cash; more commonly it was for the right to stay doubled up in a space for one more night.

The thing we really emphasize is that there's a lot of variety. I almost think of it as an entrepreneurial spirit, people doing whatever it takes to get that little amount that helps them get to the next day. But these all constitute a lot of work. They all come with risks, and they take a lot of time. The more that people are engaged in this kind of work to get a tiny amount of cash income, the less they're able to engage with the rest of American society, to look for a formal job. It's a real separating force.

Kathryn Edin
Much of it is technically illegal. Women and men, parents, talked a lot about how they felt they had to become criminals to also be providers, and that's certainly not a desirable social outcome.

Dylan Matthews
Was drug income common?

Luke Shaefer
In terms of selling drugs, no, it wasn't something we saw.

Kathryn Edin
It's so incompatible with parenthood. I've been following this long-term sample of Baltimore youth, and as soon as you have a kid, you get out. It's just not something parents do if they want to have any kind of ongoing relationship with the child.

Everything is worse in the Mississippi Delta
View attachment upload_2015-9-5_23-51-30.gif
Mario Tama/Getty Images

Garrett Grant works in a store in Glendora, Mississippi, a deeply impoverished town in the Delta region.
Dylan Matthews
One chapter of the book focuses on the Mississippi Delta. How is rural extreme poverty different from in cities?

Kathryn Edin
The Mississippi Delta is in some ways an outlier region of the country that provides the exception that proves the rule. There's a real saturation of families living in the Delta who meet the threshold. In fact, the welfare system in Mississippi pays so little that you actually qualify as $2-a-day poor if you're on welfare. It's $185 a month for a family of three with no other income. The texture of a Delta town is really jarring. What it does to the entire society is create a real chain of exploitation, where the not-quite-so-poor wind up preying on the extreme poor to get by, leading to real material hardship that's probably outside most people's sense of what ought to go on in America.

"EVERYTHING THAT WE FOUND IN OTHER PLACES WAS MAGNIFIED AND MAYBE A DECADE MORE ADVANCED IN THE MISSISSIPPI DELTA"
TWEETSHARE
People on disability in the Delta, who are only getting about $610 a month, can't live on disability alone, so they provide transportation for the extreme poor, so they can go to the grocery store, or the doctor, or the food pantry in the nearest town that has one, 30 miles away. For the privilege of riding in that gypsy cab, they're going to have to give over $30 worth of food stamps. They're going to have to go into the store not only with their own grocery list, but with the grocery list of their provider.

We also found in the Delta — because you don't have a plasma clinic nearby, you don't have a scrapyard, there is no charitable sector in these Delta towns that offers any kind of meaningful benefit — a big market for kids' Social Security numbers. You had parents and family members selling their kids' Social Security numbers to relatives and friends who were working but would otherwise not qualify for the EITC or other tax credits.

Luke Shaefer
Everything that we found in other places was magnified and maybe a decade more advanced in the Mississippi Delta. The place is really a world apart. The difference is that whole systems were failing people. To the extent that nobody was looking out for the families we followed anywhere else, it's doubly so there. It allows these exploitative relationships to go on to a degree that surprised us both, as people who study American poverty and have studied American poverty for a long time. The Mississippi just seemed an order of magnitude worse in a lot of ways.

We heard from a lot of people that if people go into a store to pay for food with SNAP, the shopkeeper might take a little extra for themselves. We've got the story of Tabitha, who gets approached by one of her teachers about having a sexual affair as a teenager.

Kathryn Edin
With the promise of food.

Luke Shaefer
Right, she's exchanging sex for food. That story is horrible by itself, but I think the thing that sets the Mississippi Delta apart is when it came to light that this happened, not only does that teacher not get criminally prosecuted, he isn't even forced to leave the school. After a lot of pushing he's not forced to stop being in the classroom. It's just a whole order of magnitude less in terms of anybody looking out for these families.

Welfare is dead
TANF-to-Poverty-Ratio-IBL.png

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

TANF's reach has fallen dramatically since welfare reform passed.
Dylan Matthews
How do people in these areas get access to the welfare state? How do they get SNAP or TANF?

Kathryn Edin
TANF is virtually dead in all of these places. It's absolutely striking that every one of our families is categorically eligible for TANF, and none of them are receiving it. For most, it doesn't even enter their minds to receive it. This was the most shocking thing of all, in a way. Prior to welfare reform, the large majority of poor people got something from the AFDC system [Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the old name of welfare] during the course of the year.

Now the fraction who get anything from TANF is very small, just over a quarter. It's really a shadow of itself. We argue that it's dead, and where it's really dead is in the imaginations and thought processes of the poor. This is not seen as a fallback. In most cases, it doesn't occur to people to apply. We saw this again and again in site after site. There are only a million adults left on the TANF rolls in the United States, and half of them are in just two states: California and New York. Many other states barely have functioning TANF systems anymore.

Luke Shaefer
SNAP was more common, especially in the Mississippi Delta. But when there's residential instability, the program often doesn't work well. We saw people who would be cut off because they moved from one office jurisdiction to another and the paperwork wasn't processed. In the cases of folks who'd been working and lost their job, the program doesn't respond as quickly as they need. But with TANF, as Kathy said, we had people say, "Oh, they just aren't giving that out anymore." Or they'd ask, "What's that?" They'd never heard of it.
 
This is disturbing, I did not expect this.
Selling plasma to survive: how over a million American families live on $2 per day
In early 2011, 1.5 million American households, including 3 million children, were living on less than $2 in cash per person per day. Half of those households didn't have access to in-kind benefits like food stamps, either. Worst of all, the numbers had increased dramatically since 1996.

Those are the astonishing findings Johns Hopkins' Kathryn Edin and the University of Michigan's Luke Shaefer discovered after analyzing Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) data in 2012. In the intervening years, Edin and Shaefer sought out Americans living in this situation, with basically no cash income, relying on food stamps, private charity, and plasma sales for survival.

The result is $2.00 a Day, a harrowing book that describes in devastating detail what life is like for the poorest of America's poor. I spoke with Edin and Shaefer about the book Friday; a lightly edited transcript follows.

How people get by on $2 a day or less
4606397617_d48bdd5670_o.jpg

US Department of Agriculture

A farmers market that accepts food stamps — which many of the extreme poor lack access to.
Dylan Matthews
How did you set about finding people living on $2 a day or less?

Kathryn Edin
Before we even went to the numbers, I was doing fieldwork here in Baltimore in the summer of 2010. I kept noticing that more and more families we were coming across didn't seem to have any means of cash income.

Initially I had kind of thought, "Maybe these people are just living on non-cash benefits like SNAP [Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program/food stamps] or housing subsidies." That's really different than it was before welfare reform, when a lot more people were claiming cash from the welfare program, but I thought that at least they would be claiming some level of protection from the government nonetheless.

But not only were people not getting any cash from TANF [Temporary Assistance to Needy Families/welfare], in many cases they weren't getting non-cash benefits either. What we saw when we went to the numbers was that although some were getting food stamps, and a few were getting a housing subsidy, half were living outside of the in-kind safety net as well. That was pretty shocking.

The other thing that shocked me was the magnitude of the problem. Over the course of a year about 3.2 to 3.4 million kids experience at least three months in $2-a-day poverty.

Luke Shaefer
So it started with the qualitative insights, and then we moved to the survey data for confirmation, and then we wanted to see if we could find more families like this in different places. We started setting up field sites and would hang out at food banks and emergency food distributors. We'd post flyers at family homeless shelters, since the book is really about families with kids. And then we recruited research collaborators who had strong ties to some of the communities that we wanted to recruit sample members from.

104161743.jpg

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Volunteers prepare meals for homeless and impoverished people at the St. Anthony Foundation dining room on September 16, 2010, in San Francisco.
Dylan Matthews
How do families making $2 per person per day get by? How do they get housing and food?

Kathryn Edin
One thing that's interesting about the population is how diverse it is. It's racially and ethnically diverse, it's regionally diverse. You see both married and unmarried couples in this situation.

Being precariously housed or homeless is not ubiquitous, but it's close to ubiquitous. In terms of survival strategies, we documented the importance of the charitable sector and vital public spaces like public libraries. But we also show that these are disproportionately available in places with the most overall resources. There is a lot more available from the charitable sector in Chicago than there is in the Mississippi Delta.

"THE PEOPLE WE TALKED TO WOULD COMMONLY HAVE A SCAR ALONG THE CREASE OF THEIR ELBOW, FROM SO MANY NEEDLE PRICKS FROM GIVING PLASMA"
TWEETSHARE
Another common strategy we saw was cashing out food stamps. This is not something the poor typically do, and I want to emphasize that, but in the world's most advanced capitalist economy, you gotta have cash. When it comes time to pay for the kids' underwear, or to buy a school uniform, you're gonna do that. Families have a very intense moral dialogue about that. They feel it's wrong and only do it in certain circumstances. It really leaves them hungry at the end of the month, though, since food stamps never come in a surplus, and they only get 50 to 60 cents on the dollar, depending on the region they're in. It's a ripoff for them and for the taxpayer, and really exposes the family to hardship.

Beyond that, there's selling plasma. You can only do it a couple times a week, and it can leave you physically debilitated. You make about $30 a time. It's fascinating sitting in front of the Cleveland Plasma Clinic, watching busload after busload of people get off at the bus stop, and the entire bus walks right into the plasma clinic. Scrapping [collecting and selling discarded metal] was the other common survival strategy that we documented. It doesn't pay well if you're only using a grocery cart, which is what most of our families are doing.

Luke Shaefer
Across the different field sites, the people we talked to would commonly have a scar along the crease of their elbow, from so many needle pricks from giving plasma. It sort of looked like a track line. It pays relatively well, but they do it so much that it's leaving a physical mark.

Some were selling sex. Sometimes it was for cash; more commonly it was for the right to stay doubled up in a space for one more night.

The thing we really emphasize is that there's a lot of variety. I almost think of it as an entrepreneurial spirit, people doing whatever it takes to get that little amount that helps them get to the next day. But these all constitute a lot of work. They all come with risks, and they take a lot of time. The more that people are engaged in this kind of work to get a tiny amount of cash income, the less they're able to engage with the rest of American society, to look for a formal job. It's a real separating force.

Kathryn Edin
Much of it is technically illegal. Women and men, parents, talked a lot about how they felt they had to become criminals to also be providers, and that's certainly not a desirable social outcome.

Dylan Matthews
Was drug income common?

Luke Shaefer
In terms of selling drugs, no, it wasn't something we saw.

Kathryn Edin
It's so incompatible with parenthood. I've been following this long-term sample of Baltimore youth, and as soon as you have a kid, you get out. It's just not something parents do if they want to have any kind of ongoing relationship with the child.

Everything is worse in the Mississippi Delta
View attachment 49455
Mario Tama/Getty Images

Garrett Grant works in a store in Glendora, Mississippi, a deeply impoverished town in the Delta region.
Dylan Matthews
One chapter of the book focuses on the Mississippi Delta. How is rural extreme poverty different from in cities?

Kathryn Edin
The Mississippi Delta is in some ways an outlier region of the country that provides the exception that proves the rule. There's a real saturation of families living in the Delta who meet the threshold. In fact, the welfare system in Mississippi pays so little that you actually qualify as $2-a-day poor if you're on welfare. It's $185 a month for a family of three with no other income. The texture of a Delta town is really jarring. What it does to the entire society is create a real chain of exploitation, where the not-quite-so-poor wind up preying on the extreme poor to get by, leading to real material hardship that's probably outside most people's sense of what ought to go on in America.

"EVERYTHING THAT WE FOUND IN OTHER PLACES WAS MAGNIFIED AND MAYBE A DECADE MORE ADVANCED IN THE MISSISSIPPI DELTA"
TWEETSHARE
People on disability in the Delta, who are only getting about $610 a month, can't live on disability alone, so they provide transportation for the extreme poor, so they can go to the grocery store, or the doctor, or the food pantry in the nearest town that has one, 30 miles away. For the privilege of riding in that gypsy cab, they're going to have to give over $30 worth of food stamps. They're going to have to go into the store not only with their own grocery list, but with the grocery list of their provider.

We also found in the Delta — because you don't have a plasma clinic nearby, you don't have a scrapyard, there is no charitable sector in these Delta towns that offers any kind of meaningful benefit — a big market for kids' Social Security numbers. You had parents and family members selling their kids' Social Security numbers to relatives and friends who were working but would otherwise not qualify for the EITC or other tax credits.

Luke Shaefer
Everything that we found in other places was magnified and maybe a decade more advanced in the Mississippi Delta. The place is really a world apart. The difference is that whole systems were failing people. To the extent that nobody was looking out for the families we followed anywhere else, it's doubly so there. It allows these exploitative relationships to go on to a degree that surprised us both, as people who study American poverty and have studied American poverty for a long time. The Mississippi just seemed an order of magnitude worse in a lot of ways.

We heard from a lot of people that if people go into a store to pay for food with SNAP, the shopkeeper might take a little extra for themselves. We've got the story of Tabitha, who gets approached by one of her teachers about having a sexual affair as a teenager.

Kathryn Edin
With the promise of food.

Luke Shaefer
Right, she's exchanging sex for food. That story is horrible by itself, but I think the thing that sets the Mississippi Delta apart is when it came to light that this happened, not only does that teacher not get criminally prosecuted, he isn't even forced to leave the school. After a lot of pushing he's not forced to stop being in the classroom. It's just a whole order of magnitude less in terms of anybody looking out for these families.

Welfare is dead
TANF-to-Poverty-Ratio-IBL.png

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

TANF's reach has fallen dramatically since welfare reform passed.
Dylan Matthews
How do people in these areas get access to the welfare state? How do they get SNAP or TANF?

Kathryn Edin
TANF is virtually dead in all of these places. It's absolutely striking that every one of our families is categorically eligible for TANF, and none of them are receiving it. For most, it doesn't even enter their minds to receive it. This was the most shocking thing of all, in a way. Prior to welfare reform, the large majority of poor people got something from the AFDC system [Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the old name of welfare] during the course of the year.

Now the fraction who get anything from TANF is very small, just over a quarter. It's really a shadow of itself. We argue that it's dead, and where it's really dead is in the imaginations and thought processes of the poor. This is not seen as a fallback. In most cases, it doesn't occur to people to apply. We saw this again and again in site after site. There are only a million adults left on the TANF rolls in the United States, and half of them are in just two states: California and New York. Many other states barely have functioning TANF systems anymore.

Luke Shaefer
SNAP was more common, especially in the Mississippi Delta. But when there's residential instability, the program often doesn't work well. We saw people who would be cut off because they moved from one office jurisdiction to another and the paperwork wasn't processed. In the cases of folks who'd been working and lost their job, the program doesn't respond as quickly as they need. But with TANF, as Kathy said, we had people say, "Oh, they just aren't giving that out anymore." Or they'd ask, "What's that?" They'd never heard of it.
Wow...

I though your Messiah had everybody living in Nirvana....

My bad???
 
This is disturbing, I did not expect this.
Selling plasma to survive: how over a million American families live on $2 per day
In early 2011, 1.5 million American households, including 3 million children, were living on less than $2 in cash per person per day. Half of those households didn't have access to in-kind benefits like food stamps, either. Worst of all, the numbers had increased dramatically since 1996.

Those are the astonishing findings Johns Hopkins' Kathryn Edin and the University of Michigan's Luke Shaefer discovered after analyzing Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) data in 2012. In the intervening years, Edin and Shaefer sought out Americans living in this situation, with basically no cash income, relying on food stamps, private charity, and plasma sales for survival.

The result is $2.00 a Day, a harrowing book that describes in devastating detail what life is like for the poorest of America's poor. I spoke with Edin and Shaefer about the book Friday; a lightly edited transcript follows.

How people get by on $2 a day or less
4606397617_d48bdd5670_o.jpg

US Department of Agriculture

A farmers market that accepts food stamps — which many of the extreme poor lack access to.
Dylan Matthews
How did you set about finding people living on $2 a day or less?

Kathryn Edin
Before we even went to the numbers, I was doing fieldwork here in Baltimore in the summer of 2010. I kept noticing that more and more families we were coming across didn't seem to have any means of cash income.

Initially I had kind of thought, "Maybe these people are just living on non-cash benefits like SNAP [Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program/food stamps] or housing subsidies." That's really different than it was before welfare reform, when a lot more people were claiming cash from the welfare program, but I thought that at least they would be claiming some level of protection from the government nonetheless.

But not only were people not getting any cash from TANF [Temporary Assistance to Needy Families/welfare], in many cases they weren't getting non-cash benefits either. What we saw when we went to the numbers was that although some were getting food stamps, and a few were getting a housing subsidy, half were living outside of the in-kind safety net as well. That was pretty shocking.

The other thing that shocked me was the magnitude of the problem. Over the course of a year about 3.2 to 3.4 million kids experience at least three months in $2-a-day poverty.

Luke Shaefer
So it started with the qualitative insights, and then we moved to the survey data for confirmation, and then we wanted to see if we could find more families like this in different places. We started setting up field sites and would hang out at food banks and emergency food distributors. We'd post flyers at family homeless shelters, since the book is really about families with kids. And then we recruited research collaborators who had strong ties to some of the communities that we wanted to recruit sample members from.

104161743.jpg

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Volunteers prepare meals for homeless and impoverished people at the St. Anthony Foundation dining room on September 16, 2010, in San Francisco.
Dylan Matthews
How do families making $2 per person per day get by? How do they get housing and food?

Kathryn Edin
One thing that's interesting about the population is how diverse it is. It's racially and ethnically diverse, it's regionally diverse. You see both married and unmarried couples in this situation.

Being precariously housed or homeless is not ubiquitous, but it's close to ubiquitous. In terms of survival strategies, we documented the importance of the charitable sector and vital public spaces like public libraries. But we also show that these are disproportionately available in places with the most overall resources. There is a lot more available from the charitable sector in Chicago than there is in the Mississippi Delta.

"THE PEOPLE WE TALKED TO WOULD COMMONLY HAVE A SCAR ALONG THE CREASE OF THEIR ELBOW, FROM SO MANY NEEDLE PRICKS FROM GIVING PLASMA"
TWEETSHARE
Another common strategy we saw was cashing out food stamps. This is not something the poor typically do, and I want to emphasize that, but in the world's most advanced capitalist economy, you gotta have cash. When it comes time to pay for the kids' underwear, or to buy a school uniform, you're gonna do that. Families have a very intense moral dialogue about that. They feel it's wrong and only do it in certain circumstances. It really leaves them hungry at the end of the month, though, since food stamps never come in a surplus, and they only get 50 to 60 cents on the dollar, depending on the region they're in. It's a ripoff for them and for the taxpayer, and really exposes the family to hardship.

Beyond that, there's selling plasma. You can only do it a couple times a week, and it can leave you physically debilitated. You make about $30 a time. It's fascinating sitting in front of the Cleveland Plasma Clinic, watching busload after busload of people get off at the bus stop, and the entire bus walks right into the plasma clinic. Scrapping [collecting and selling discarded metal] was the other common survival strategy that we documented. It doesn't pay well if you're only using a grocery cart, which is what most of our families are doing.

Luke Shaefer
Across the different field sites, the people we talked to would commonly have a scar along the crease of their elbow, from so many needle pricks from giving plasma. It sort of looked like a track line. It pays relatively well, but they do it so much that it's leaving a physical mark.

Some were selling sex. Sometimes it was for cash; more commonly it was for the right to stay doubled up in a space for one more night.

The thing we really emphasize is that there's a lot of variety. I almost think of it as an entrepreneurial spirit, people doing whatever it takes to get that little amount that helps them get to the next day. But these all constitute a lot of work. They all come with risks, and they take a lot of time. The more that people are engaged in this kind of work to get a tiny amount of cash income, the less they're able to engage with the rest of American society, to look for a formal job. It's a real separating force.

Kathryn Edin
Much of it is technically illegal. Women and men, parents, talked a lot about how they felt they had to become criminals to also be providers, and that's certainly not a desirable social outcome.

Dylan Matthews
Was drug income common?

Luke Shaefer
In terms of selling drugs, no, it wasn't something we saw.

Kathryn Edin
It's so incompatible with parenthood. I've been following this long-term sample of Baltimore youth, and as soon as you have a kid, you get out. It's just not something parents do if they want to have any kind of ongoing relationship with the child.

Everything is worse in the Mississippi Delta
View attachment 49455
Mario Tama/Getty Images

Garrett Grant works in a store in Glendora, Mississippi, a deeply impoverished town in the Delta region.
Dylan Matthews
One chapter of the book focuses on the Mississippi Delta. How is rural extreme poverty different from in cities?

Kathryn Edin
The Mississippi Delta is in some ways an outlier region of the country that provides the exception that proves the rule. There's a real saturation of families living in the Delta who meet the threshold. In fact, the welfare system in Mississippi pays so little that you actually qualify as $2-a-day poor if you're on welfare. It's $185 a month for a family of three with no other income. The texture of a Delta town is really jarring. What it does to the entire society is create a real chain of exploitation, where the not-quite-so-poor wind up preying on the extreme poor to get by, leading to real material hardship that's probably outside most people's sense of what ought to go on in America.

"EVERYTHING THAT WE FOUND IN OTHER PLACES WAS MAGNIFIED AND MAYBE A DECADE MORE ADVANCED IN THE MISSISSIPPI DELTA"
TWEETSHARE
People on disability in the Delta, who are only getting about $610 a month, can't live on disability alone, so they provide transportation for the extreme poor, so they can go to the grocery store, or the doctor, or the food pantry in the nearest town that has one, 30 miles away. For the privilege of riding in that gypsy cab, they're going to have to give over $30 worth of food stamps. They're going to have to go into the store not only with their own grocery list, but with the grocery list of their provider.

We also found in the Delta — because you don't have a plasma clinic nearby, you don't have a scrapyard, there is no charitable sector in these Delta towns that offers any kind of meaningful benefit — a big market for kids' Social Security numbers. You had parents and family members selling their kids' Social Security numbers to relatives and friends who were working but would otherwise not qualify for the EITC or other tax credits.

Luke Shaefer
Everything that we found in other places was magnified and maybe a decade more advanced in the Mississippi Delta. The place is really a world apart. The difference is that whole systems were failing people. To the extent that nobody was looking out for the families we followed anywhere else, it's doubly so there. It allows these exploitative relationships to go on to a degree that surprised us both, as people who study American poverty and have studied American poverty for a long time. The Mississippi just seemed an order of magnitude worse in a lot of ways.

We heard from a lot of people that if people go into a store to pay for food with SNAP, the shopkeeper might take a little extra for themselves. We've got the story of Tabitha, who gets approached by one of her teachers about having a sexual affair as a teenager.

Kathryn Edin
With the promise of food.

Luke Shaefer
Right, she's exchanging sex for food. That story is horrible by itself, but I think the thing that sets the Mississippi Delta apart is when it came to light that this happened, not only does that teacher not get criminally prosecuted, he isn't even forced to leave the school. After a lot of pushing he's not forced to stop being in the classroom. It's just a whole order of magnitude less in terms of anybody looking out for these families.

Welfare is dead
TANF-to-Poverty-Ratio-IBL.png

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

TANF's reach has fallen dramatically since welfare reform passed.
Dylan Matthews
How do people in these areas get access to the welfare state? How do they get SNAP or TANF?

Kathryn Edin
TANF is virtually dead in all of these places. It's absolutely striking that every one of our families is categorically eligible for TANF, and none of them are receiving it. For most, it doesn't even enter their minds to receive it. This was the most shocking thing of all, in a way. Prior to welfare reform, the large majority of poor people got something from the AFDC system [Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the old name of welfare] during the course of the year.

Now the fraction who get anything from TANF is very small, just over a quarter. It's really a shadow of itself. We argue that it's dead, and where it's really dead is in the imaginations and thought processes of the poor. This is not seen as a fallback. In most cases, it doesn't occur to people to apply. We saw this again and again in site after site. There are only a million adults left on the TANF rolls in the United States, and half of them are in just two states: California and New York. Many other states barely have functioning TANF systems anymore.

Luke Shaefer
SNAP was more common, especially in the Mississippi Delta. But when there's residential instability, the program often doesn't work well. We saw people who would be cut off because they moved from one office jurisdiction to another and the paperwork wasn't processed. In the cases of folks who'd been working and lost their job, the program doesn't respond as quickly as they need. But with TANF, as Kathy said, we had people say, "Oh, they just aren't giving that out anymore." Or they'd ask, "What's that?" They'd never heard of it.
Wow...

I though your Messiah had everybody living in Nirvana....

My bad???

Isn't there some rules about how long your blogs can be.
 
This is disturbing, I did not expect this.
Selling plasma to survive: how over a million American families live on $2 per day
In early 2011, 1.5 million American households, including 3 million children, were living on less than $2 in cash per person per day. Half of those households didn't have access to in-kind benefits like food stamps, either. Worst of all, the numbers had increased dramatically since 1996.

Those are the astonishing findings Johns Hopkins' Kathryn Edin and the University of Michigan's Luke Shaefer discovered after analyzing Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) data in 2012. In the intervening years, Edin and Shaefer sought out Americans living in this situation, with basically no cash income, relying on food stamps, private charity, and plasma sales for survival.

The result is $2.00 a Day, a harrowing book that describes in devastating detail what life is like for the poorest of America's poor. I spoke with Edin and Shaefer about the book Friday; a lightly edited transcript follows.

How people get by on $2 a day or less
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US Department of Agriculture

A farmers market that accepts food stamps — which many of the extreme poor lack access to.
Dylan Matthews
How did you set about finding people living on $2 a day or less?

Kathryn Edin
Before we even went to the numbers, I was doing fieldwork here in Baltimore in the summer of 2010. I kept noticing that more and more families we were coming across didn't seem to have any means of cash income.

Initially I had kind of thought, "Maybe these people are just living on non-cash benefits like SNAP [Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program/food stamps] or housing subsidies." That's really different than it was before welfare reform, when a lot more people were claiming cash from the welfare program, but I thought that at least they would be claiming some level of protection from the government nonetheless.

But not only were people not getting any cash from TANF [Temporary Assistance to Needy Families/welfare], in many cases they weren't getting non-cash benefits either. What we saw when we went to the numbers was that although some were getting food stamps, and a few were getting a housing subsidy, half were living outside of the in-kind safety net as well. That was pretty shocking.

The other thing that shocked me was the magnitude of the problem. Over the course of a year about 3.2 to 3.4 million kids experience at least three months in $2-a-day poverty.

Luke Shaefer
So it started with the qualitative insights, and then we moved to the survey data for confirmation, and then we wanted to see if we could find more families like this in different places. We started setting up field sites and would hang out at food banks and emergency food distributors. We'd post flyers at family homeless shelters, since the book is really about families with kids. And then we recruited research collaborators who had strong ties to some of the communities that we wanted to recruit sample members from.

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Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Volunteers prepare meals for homeless and impoverished people at the St. Anthony Foundation dining room on September 16, 2010, in San Francisco.
Dylan Matthews
How do families making $2 per person per day get by? How do they get housing and food?

Kathryn Edin
One thing that's interesting about the population is how diverse it is. It's racially and ethnically diverse, it's regionally diverse. You see both married and unmarried couples in this situation.

Being precariously housed or homeless is not ubiquitous, but it's close to ubiquitous. In terms of survival strategies, we documented the importance of the charitable sector and vital public spaces like public libraries. But we also show that these are disproportionately available in places with the most overall resources. There is a lot more available from the charitable sector in Chicago than there is in the Mississippi Delta.

"THE PEOPLE WE TALKED TO WOULD COMMONLY HAVE A SCAR ALONG THE CREASE OF THEIR ELBOW, FROM SO MANY NEEDLE PRICKS FROM GIVING PLASMA"
TWEETSHARE
Another common strategy we saw was cashing out food stamps. This is not something the poor typically do, and I want to emphasize that, but in the world's most advanced capitalist economy, you gotta have cash. When it comes time to pay for the kids' underwear, or to buy a school uniform, you're gonna do that. Families have a very intense moral dialogue about that. They feel it's wrong and only do it in certain circumstances. It really leaves them hungry at the end of the month, though, since food stamps never come in a surplus, and they only get 50 to 60 cents on the dollar, depending on the region they're in. It's a ripoff for them and for the taxpayer, and really exposes the family to hardship.

Beyond that, there's selling plasma. You can only do it a couple times a week, and it can leave you physically debilitated. You make about $30 a time. It's fascinating sitting in front of the Cleveland Plasma Clinic, watching busload after busload of people get off at the bus stop, and the entire bus walks right into the plasma clinic. Scrapping [collecting and selling discarded metal] was the other common survival strategy that we documented. It doesn't pay well if you're only using a grocery cart, which is what most of our families are doing.

Luke Shaefer
Across the different field sites, the people we talked to would commonly have a scar along the crease of their elbow, from so many needle pricks from giving plasma. It sort of looked like a track line. It pays relatively well, but they do it so much that it's leaving a physical mark.

Some were selling sex. Sometimes it was for cash; more commonly it was for the right to stay doubled up in a space for one more night.

The thing we really emphasize is that there's a lot of variety. I almost think of it as an entrepreneurial spirit, people doing whatever it takes to get that little amount that helps them get to the next day. But these all constitute a lot of work. They all come with risks, and they take a lot of time. The more that people are engaged in this kind of work to get a tiny amount of cash income, the less they're able to engage with the rest of American society, to look for a formal job. It's a real separating force.

Kathryn Edin
Much of it is technically illegal. Women and men, parents, talked a lot about how they felt they had to become criminals to also be providers, and that's certainly not a desirable social outcome.

Dylan Matthews
Was drug income common?

Luke Shaefer
In terms of selling drugs, no, it wasn't something we saw.

Kathryn Edin
It's so incompatible with parenthood. I've been following this long-term sample of Baltimore youth, and as soon as you have a kid, you get out. It's just not something parents do if they want to have any kind of ongoing relationship with the child.

Everything is worse in the Mississippi Delta
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Mario Tama/Getty Images

Garrett Grant works in a store in Glendora, Mississippi, a deeply impoverished town in the Delta region.
Dylan Matthews
One chapter of the book focuses on the Mississippi Delta. How is rural extreme poverty different from in cities?

Kathryn Edin
The Mississippi Delta is in some ways an outlier region of the country that provides the exception that proves the rule. There's a real saturation of families living in the Delta who meet the threshold. In fact, the welfare system in Mississippi pays so little that you actually qualify as $2-a-day poor if you're on welfare. It's $185 a month for a family of three with no other income. The texture of a Delta town is really jarring. What it does to the entire society is create a real chain of exploitation, where the not-quite-so-poor wind up preying on the extreme poor to get by, leading to real material hardship that's probably outside most people's sense of what ought to go on in America.

"EVERYTHING THAT WE FOUND IN OTHER PLACES WAS MAGNIFIED AND MAYBE A DECADE MORE ADVANCED IN THE MISSISSIPPI DELTA"
TWEETSHARE
People on disability in the Delta, who are only getting about $610 a month, can't live on disability alone, so they provide transportation for the extreme poor, so they can go to the grocery store, or the doctor, or the food pantry in the nearest town that has one, 30 miles away. For the privilege of riding in that gypsy cab, they're going to have to give over $30 worth of food stamps. They're going to have to go into the store not only with their own grocery list, but with the grocery list of their provider.

We also found in the Delta — because you don't have a plasma clinic nearby, you don't have a scrapyard, there is no charitable sector in these Delta towns that offers any kind of meaningful benefit — a big market for kids' Social Security numbers. You had parents and family members selling their kids' Social Security numbers to relatives and friends who were working but would otherwise not qualify for the EITC or other tax credits.

Luke Shaefer
Everything that we found in other places was magnified and maybe a decade more advanced in the Mississippi Delta. The place is really a world apart. The difference is that whole systems were failing people. To the extent that nobody was looking out for the families we followed anywhere else, it's doubly so there. It allows these exploitative relationships to go on to a degree that surprised us both, as people who study American poverty and have studied American poverty for a long time. The Mississippi just seemed an order of magnitude worse in a lot of ways.

We heard from a lot of people that if people go into a store to pay for food with SNAP, the shopkeeper might take a little extra for themselves. We've got the story of Tabitha, who gets approached by one of her teachers about having a sexual affair as a teenager.

Kathryn Edin
With the promise of food.

Luke Shaefer
Right, she's exchanging sex for food. That story is horrible by itself, but I think the thing that sets the Mississippi Delta apart is when it came to light that this happened, not only does that teacher not get criminally prosecuted, he isn't even forced to leave the school. After a lot of pushing he's not forced to stop being in the classroom. It's just a whole order of magnitude less in terms of anybody looking out for these families.

Welfare is dead
TANF-to-Poverty-Ratio-IBL.png

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

TANF's reach has fallen dramatically since welfare reform passed.
Dylan Matthews
How do people in these areas get access to the welfare state? How do they get SNAP or TANF?

Kathryn Edin
TANF is virtually dead in all of these places. It's absolutely striking that every one of our families is categorically eligible for TANF, and none of them are receiving it. For most, it doesn't even enter their minds to receive it. This was the most shocking thing of all, in a way. Prior to welfare reform, the large majority of poor people got something from the AFDC system [Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the old name of welfare] during the course of the year.

Now the fraction who get anything from TANF is very small, just over a quarter. It's really a shadow of itself. We argue that it's dead, and where it's really dead is in the imaginations and thought processes of the poor. This is not seen as a fallback. In most cases, it doesn't occur to people to apply. We saw this again and again in site after site. There are only a million adults left on the TANF rolls in the United States, and half of them are in just two states: California and New York. Many other states barely have functioning TANF systems anymore.

Luke Shaefer
SNAP was more common, especially in the Mississippi Delta. But when there's residential instability, the program often doesn't work well. We saw people who would be cut off because they moved from one office jurisdiction to another and the paperwork wasn't processed. In the cases of folks who'd been working and lost their job, the program doesn't respond as quickly as they need. But with TANF, as Kathy said, we had people say, "Oh, they just aren't giving that out anymore." Or they'd ask, "What's that?" They'd never heard of it.
Wow...

I though your Messiah had everybody living in Nirvana....

My bad???

Isn't there some rules about how long your blogs can be.
I think he gets paid a nickel a word...

You know, times are tough with Obamanomics, so we try to be tolerant.
 

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