San Antonio College Library

This book looks at the way we tax the poor in the United States, particularly in the American South, where poor families are often subject to income taxes, and where regressive sales taxes apply even to food for home consumption. The authors argue that these policies contribute in unrecognized ways to poverty related problems like obesity, early mortality, the high school dropout rates, teen pregnancy, and crime. They show how, decades before California's...

Income inequality is an increasingly pressing issue in the United States and around the world. This book explores five critical issues to introduce some of the key moral and empirical questions about income, gender, and racial inequality: Do we have a moral obligation to eliminate poverty? Is inequality a necessary evil that's the best way available to motivate economic action and increase total output? Can we retain a meaningful democracy even when...

Eberstadt argues that the official poverty rate is incapable of accurately representing long-term trends for material want in modern America, and that standards of living for the official poverty population are far higher today than they were in 1964 or 1965, at the start of the War on Poverty.

When homelessness became increasingly visible in the early 1980s, most Americans were reluctant to admit that the homeless people they encountered were chronically disabled by alcoholism, drug addiction, and mental illness. The media, policymakers, and the American public, persuaded by advocates for the homeless, came to believe that the homeless were simply victims of the hardships of poverty and the lack of affordable housing, both of which were...

This book gives voice to the 57 million Americans--including 21 percent of the nation's children--who are sandwiched between poor and middle class. While government programs help the needy and politicians woo the more fortunate, the "Missing Class" is largely invisible and ignored. Through the experiences of nine families, sociologists Newman and Chen trace the unique problems faced by individuals in this large and growing demographic--the "near poor"--Who...

Food insecurity rates, which skyrocketed with the Great Recession, have yet to fall to pre-recession levels. Food pantries are stretched thin, and states are imposing new restrictions on programs like SNAP that are preventing people from getting crucial government assistance. At the same time, we see an increase in obesity that results from lack of access to healthy foods. The poor face a daily choice between paying bills and paying for food. -- Publisher...

"Dwight Billings and Kathleen Blee examine the making of wealth and inequality in persistently poor rural communities through the history of Clay Country, an especially poor section of the Eastern Kentucky mountains in Appalachia. Though this area has been the target of repeated antipoverty and economic development programs, few of these have had a lasting impact. The authors uncover the systemic problems and patterns of low income by tracing the...

Across the United States tens of millions of people are working 40 or more hours a week ... and living in poverty. This is surprising in a country where politicians promise that anyone who does their share, and works hard, will get ahead. In Ending Poverty as We Know It, Quigley argures that it is time to make good on that promise by adding to the Constitution language that insures those who want to work can do so at a wage that affords them reasonable...