Reddit reviews The Working Poor: Invisible in America

You'll need to clarify your reset point: do people start again earning the same incomes as they were before? If not, how are jobs divvied out and so forth? Do they live in the same places? If not, how is housing divvied up? Are races the same as before? How does the reset work after the reset?

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I'll just talk about one example, since I don't know the answer to those questions;

• Transportation.
  
  The US is perhaps the most car-dependent developed country, certainly more car-dependent than just about any European country, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, etc. Maybe Saudi Arabia is more car-dependent, due to them having had a decades-long policy of super subsidizing gas to where it was like 30 cents a gallon. Anyway.
  
  "What do cars have to do with equality, though?" you may ask. And the answer is that a car is a durable good, a high-cost investment item. Yes, most people in the US have a car of some sort, but 1) the quality of those cars varies dramatically, and 2) the poorest don't have cars.
  
  Then consider the fact that our infrastructure is designed around an implicit assumption that you'll have a car. In many towns I've lived in, there simply isn't a sidewalk in most places, and the very layout of the stores and shops and jobs assume distances for driving, not walking, meaning that often the nearest store is miles away, on roads with no sidewalks.
  
  That impacts your choices. If you don't have a car and the nearest grocery store is 3 miles away, that makes it very hard for you to get groceries. Convenience stores tend to be a lot closer, though, so you'll have a tendency to go to the nearest convenience store, even though they sell you smaller quantities for higher prices than the grocery store, because they know they can get away with it.
  
  Imagine having to go to a job, and you've got a car, but it's unreliable. I had a friend in highschool, when he put the key in the ignition, it was even odds whether the car would start. He got a job at the Subway down the hill from where we live, which was still a mile's walk from his house mind you, no sidewalks, down a steep incline (and back up it at the end of his shift), because it was the only place near enough to where he could still get there by walking in case his car didn't want to start that day.
  
  Imagine you're equally qualified with another candidate, but your car is unreliable, and his isn't, and you arrive 10 minutes late to the interview. You know that's going to hurt you.
  
  Most people can't afford a car outright, which is where the car loan comes in. For the middle class, this really doesn't make that big a difference. You might end up paying a bit more than you want, but you'll definitely get the loan. But if you're poor, your credit may not be good enough to even get a loan for a car, or if you can get a loan, you'll get charged a higher interest rate, so you end up paying more money for the same access to transportation.
  
  Or take another scenario: your car randomly blows up and stops working, it'll cost $1000 to fix it. Now, that's a hard pill to swallow for even a lot of middle class people, but they can still manage it. But for the working poor, this is a crisis. They need the car to get to work, they rely on that. But they may not have $1000 to their name upfront, so they're in a Catch-22; they need the car, to get to work, to get the income, to pay for the car, but first they need to pay for the car, so they can get to work, so they can get the income. And that's where shit like payday loans start coming in, an 'advance' on your paycheck that's actually an outrageously high interest short-term loan. You know you're being fucked, but you don't have a choice; you NEED that car to get to work.
  
  It's shit like this that's the most indicative of the difference between the poor and the middle class, when some unexpected financial demand pops up. For the middle class, that's an irritation. For the poor, that's a crisis.
  
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  This is getting pretty long, so I'll just say, take that example, and then apply it to EVERYTHING.
  
  
• Consider that most salaried jobs offer health insurance benefits, and most working-class hourly jobs don't.
  
  
• Consider that most salaried jobs offer vacation days and sick days, and quite a lot of hourly jobs just don't; even worse, they'll schedule you at different shifts so that you're not even sleeping at the same time consistently.
  
  
• Consider that you can often end up spending more money paying for the same thing, because you don't have money to begin with, which affects your loan interest rates.
  
  
• Consider that how well a kid does in school has a lot to do with how rich or poor their parents are, but then that translates into that kid's future career prospects.
  
  Etc, etc, etc.
  
  For more examples and a deep dive into the kind of unconscious impersonal economic structures that hold the poor back, check out The Working Poor: Invisible in America.

Most people are just fine, until they're not. One medical expense (emergency appendectomy, broken leg, etc) can take you from comfortable to poor nearly immediately. This is far more pronounced with poor people who struggle to save 100 bucks, when a big medical bill can be 5k or more.

Check out the book Nickled and Dimed. It gives you a really great perspective on all the weird exploitations and the thing you never think of when you have money. My family grew up with this kind of lifestyle for the first 12-ish years of my life. It's really heartbreaking to see someone's whole life come crashing down because of one small hiccup, and it takes years to recover. It is pretty controversial (as a book of this subject should be), but for a less emotional look, check out The Working Poor: Invisible in America.

These situations are why universal health care is something I support, even though I know it would ultimately cost me more. If we could take away the single biggest surprise expense that haunts poor people, we give a lot of them the chance to move up the ladder. The people who are against it aren't those at the top, but those just a step up from abject poverty. There's a "pulling the ladder up behind you" mentality that a lot of people have. Same reason that so many people who work low-paying jobs hate minimum wage rises: their wage becomes less "valuable"

Danke für den Buchtipp und vor allem den Kauftipp beim BPB! Mehr über das Thema und die Einordnung in den größeren Kontext der USA gibts in Klassikern wie The Working Poor von Shipler und mein persönlicher Favorit Empire of Illusion von Hedges (welches auch einen Pulitzerpreis gewann) nachzulesen.

sure!

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic
Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America
The Working Poor: Invisible in America
Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives
Clothing Poverty: The Hidden World of Fast Fashion and Second-hand Clothes

Stop watching Fox news. Start reading books. http://www.amazon.com/The-Working-Poor-Invisible-America/dp/0375708219