| Selected Excerpts | |||
| No
matter what your public policy interest, American Dream is brimming with real-world
examples of the way real lives are affected by the issues that many of us only
discuss in philosophical terms. From child care to domestic violence to drugs,
hunger, and poverty rates, there’s something in this book for everyone. Click
on the topics listed below to read passages from American Dream. | |||
| The Topics | |||
|
Caseload declines | Housing/homelessness Hunger Minimum wage Transportation | ||
|
The welfare rolls collapsed. They collapsed in
Boston and they collapsed in Phoenix. They collapsed in New York City. They fell
fastest in states like Wisconsin and Florida, which made aggressive moves. But
they also gave way in Texas and Illinois, which showed little bureaucratic zeal.
They plunged where the economy boomed, and they plunged in stretches of the poverty
belt, from New Mexico to West Virginia. Historically, the rolls had never fallen
more than 8 percent in a year. By the time they leveled off in 2001, they had
fallen for seven straight years by a total of 63 percent. In Wisconsin, a half-dozen
counties at some point in the year had a W-2 caseload of zero. Three million families-more
than 9 million people-left the rolls nationwide. Clearly something happened that
neither economics nor policy fully explains. (214) | |||
|
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Child Care | |||
|
One afternoon, a nervous client named Kimberly Hansen told Michael
she was ready to get out of the house. At twenty-five, she had been home for six
years, caring for a daughter with cerebral palsy. But child care was going to
be a problem: the girl needed a day-care center with transportation, wheelchair
access, and someone who could feed her through a gastrointestinal tube. Previous
caseworkers, following the book, had fobbed her off on an ineffective child-care
referral service. Michael spent three hours calling around town and got her appointments
to inspect two places….She got a job. She lost the job. She fell into a pit
of depression. A doctor warned the depression stemmed from her fears of leaving
Mercedes, but she wouldn't go to counseling. There are "perverts out there"
in day-care centers, she told Michael. Since Mercedes can't talk, if someone tried
to hurt her, Hansen wouldn't even know. Months passed until she felt ready to
work again. When she did, the day-care center wouldn't let Mercedes return. Hansen
owed $40 in late fees and "Ebenezer Day Care," as Michael dubbed it,
wouldn't budge. (p. 256) | |||
|
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Child well being | |||
|
How much does having a working mother-a single, low-income working
mother-enhance the life chances of the kids? Will it bring them a new shot at
the American Dream? Bill Clinton, among others, saw working mothers as a source
of inspiration; critics saw kids left in substandard care while the only parent
they had was away. Either scenario-rising achievement or rising neglect-had a
plausible logic. Now there is some data. Studies of a dozen programs have followed
poor children as their mothers went to work, and collectively they have examined
everything from changes in meal times and reading habits to criminal arrests…(p.
311) | |||
|
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Domestic violence | |||
|
Marcus got home at 1:00 a.m., full of Courvoisier.
Angie rode up ninety minutes later, with Tony at the wheel. Marcus swore he saw
her kissing him! He knew she had been messing with that man! Suddenly Marcus was
banging on the car window and running for his shotgun. As Angie climbed the steps,
Marcus was shooting at Tony's taillights. Angie brushed past him with a laugh.
Hadn't she warned him that her day was coming? She taunted him with an R. Kelly
song about feminine revenge-"When a Woman's Fed Up"-and locked herself
in the bathroom. The next thing she knew, Marcus had blasted a hole in the ceiling
outside the door. "I was thinking,‘Damn!'' Angie said. This man's ``trying
to kill me!’" Angie said. (p. 280) | |||
|
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Drugs | |||
|
One thing that Opal couldn't understand
was why people smoked cocaine. What could make them rob their families, neglect
their kids, even sell their bodies to get it? "I saw how bad they looked
and I said, 'Man, how could they do that?'" Robert Lee's brother had started
smoking Primos, cigarettes laced with crack, and when Sierra was about a year
old, he rolled one for Opal. She smoked it and felt nothing. She tried it again.
"And you know what?" she said. "It didn't take no time at all to
get hooked. But you don't know you're hooked." A few months later, Opal was
pregnant with her second child and getting high constantly. (p. 201-202) | |||
|
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Earnings and Income | |||
|
In ballpark terms, if you count everyone leaving welfare (including those without jobs), the average woman earned less than $9,000 in her first year off the rolls. Count workers alone, and the figure grows to about $12,000. Count steady workers (excluding those who go back on welfare), and you can get to $14,500. Their paychecks did grow with time; in Wisconsin, the earnings of the average "leaver" rose 26 percent over three years. Still, their annual earnings over the three-year stretch averaged just $10,400….With earnings of $12,700, Jewell was well ahead of the pack. With $16,100 Angie was a star. (286)* * * As a strategy for promoting work, the law did its job:
Angie's annual earnings more than doubled. Adding in tax credits (and subtracting
FICA), the amount she brought home from the workplace rose by $12,200 a year.
Yet the drop in welfare and food stamps cost her $8,800. On balance, she was up
$3,400, a gain of 16 percent. Or was she, really? The more she worked, the more
her work expenses increased. There was bus fare, babysitting, work uniforms, and
snacks from the vending machine. In Angie's case, the child-care costs were minimal,
since the kids mostly minded themselves. But figure just $30 week for bus rides
and the stolen car, a conservative estimate, and you wipe out nearly half the
gain. In leaving welfare, Angie also lost her health insurance. (p. 283-284) | |||
|
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Family Structure | |||
|
Launching his attack on welfare in 1994, Newt Gingrich had warned
that the growth of nonmarital births threatened American "civilization."
That year, 32.6 percent of children were born outside of marriage. As Jewell was
visiting Ken in prison, hoping to have his baby, the figure was up to 33.0 percent,
and a few years later it hit 34.0 percent. There may be no statistic that said
more about the prospects of the next generation. By 2002, 23.0 percent of whites,
43.5 percent of Hispanics, and 68.2 percent of African Americans were born outside
of marriage-a total of 1.4 million kids. That doesn't mean that the welfare bill
had no effect on childbearing. The increase in nonmarital births slowed to a crawl
and did so just as the attacks on "illegitimacy" hit fever pitch. It
would be remarkable if that were pure coincidence…. (p. 294) | |||
|
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Health care | |||
|
The kids remained on Medicaid, which was crucial
with Kesha's asthma attacks. But for twenty of her first thirty-six months off
the rolls, Angie earned just enough to get disqualified….Other than her back,
Angie was healthy. Jewell was not. She also lost her health insurance for two
years, and Jewell had bleeding ulcers. "I just dealt with that pain,"
she said. "I just got a lot of Tums, Rolaids, stuff like that." In the
end, she was hospitalized and her wages were garnished to pay the bill, a circumstance
that struck her as nothing unusual. "Anybody that works is gonna get their
check garnished," she said. "Everybody in Milwaukee owes a hospital
bill." (p. 283) | |||
|
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Housing/Homelessness | |||
|
With the pit bulls having destroyed the attic,
Angie was out of space. The boys shared a foldout sofa in the living room, while
Opal, Kesha, and Brierra squeezed into one bed and Angie and Marcus shared the
other. The Concordia Street house was a shambles. The second-floor balcony dropped
rails like rotted teeth, and so many roaches swarmed about that Opal lay awake
worried that one would crawl in Brierra's ear. Angie blamed the landlord for not
fixing things. The landlord blamed Angie for not paying the rent and tried to
evict her twice. (p. 266) One of
the saddest sights I encountered in Milwaukee was that of Amber Peck, a fiftyish
woman who lost her check, her apartment, and after a drug binge, her spot in a
homeless shelter. We met on a snowy February night, and I gave her a ride to a
cross-town church that had opened its floors to the dispossessed. She said that
while she had understood the work rules, she couldn't bring herself to comply.
"I stay depressed all the time." Then gripping two shopping bags filled
with old clothes, she picked her way across an icy church lawn to lie on the hard,
lonely floor.… A few years later, I went looking for Amber Peck, wondering
whatever had become of her impossibly sad silhouette. The trail led to a low-income
Samaritan named Eula Edwards. Amber was locked up on a drug charge, and Edwards
was relieved. Before her arrest, Amber had been beaten on the streets and all
but left for dead. (p. 169-70) | |||
|
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hunger | |||
|
Angie was too proud to say that anyone
in the house went hungry-"We survive! Ain't nobody starving in there!"-but
it wasn't unusual at the end of the month to find the refrigerator reduced to
a box of fish sticks and a bottle of ketchup. Half the household fights, it seemed,
revolved around a shortage of food. Opal was supposed to help stock the fridge,
but she sold some of her stamps for spending money and kept a cache of snacks
locked in her room. One morning, after she beat Darrell to the last drop of milk
for the cereal, the five-year-old flung himself to the floor. | |||
|
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Minimum wage | |||
|
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Transportation | |||
|
Angie bought the kids new beds and sank most of the rest, about
$2,000, into another car. A "nice car." A car on the outer edges of
what she could afford. The salesman said he knew the previous owner and promised
the car had been fastidiously maintained. It broke down five times in the first
few weeks. Then it threw a rod. In the spring of 1997, Angie had the useless hulk
towed back to the lot, where it sat as a smoldering monument to the salesman's
empty assurances. "It was towed more than it was driven!" she said.
A poor black woman with a melted engine is not one of society's more empowered
figures. But what she lacked in automotive sophistication, Angie made up for with
fury. (P. 179) | |||
|
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Other Topics Covered | |||
|
Abortion |
Entitlement |
Payroll Taxes Privatization Prostitution Sanctions and time limits Self-efficacy Sexual abuse Teen pregnancy Transportation | |
 |
| Web
site, event and media relations assistance provided by McNeely Pigott & Fox
Public Relations of Nashville, Tenn. For more information on MP&F, visit www.mpf.com. |