Must-Read: Jared Bernstein: How Welfare Reform Ruined Public Assistance for the Very Poor, According to Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer’s New Book, $2.00 a Day

Must-Read: Jared Bernstein: How Welfare Reform Ruined Public Assistance for the Very Poor, According to Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer’s New Book, $2.00 a Day: “Over the past few decades, anti-poverty policy in this country…

…has evolved to be ‘pro-work.’… Low-income parent[s] who[‘re] well connected to the job market the government will help…. But if you’re disconnected from the job market public policy won’t help you much…. How do people in that second group survive?… Edin and… Shaefer…. A few… strategies: availing themselves of charities and public spaces (like libraries), selling food stamps for cash (illegal, and they typically get just 60 cents on the dollar on the street), relying on relatives (who can be as hurtful as helpful), selling scrap metal or aluminum cans, selling plasma (which involves considerable angst as to whether a person’s blood’s iron levels are sufficiently high, especially difficult around menstruation), receiving some public support (housing vouchers, nutritional support, disability payments), occasionally holding a job, and—the most common strategy of all—just going without…. $2-a-day poverty doesn’t mean that their subjects really survive for long periods on nothing but $2 a day… no one could survive in this country if that was all they had to live on over an extended period. What they call ‘$2-a-day poverty’ means spells of scraping by on almost no regular, reliable income, though many may be able to access the dicey income sources just noted above…. ‘1.5 million households with roughly 3 million children were surviving on cash incomes of no more than $2 per person, per day in any given month’ in 2011. That’s about 4 percent of all families with kids, though once you start adding other resources, like the value of SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, more commonly known as food stamps), that percentage declines. Though blacks and Hispanics are disproportionately likely to be deeply poor, half are white…