Poverty Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Poverty - Essay Example The cultural concept of the ‘American dream’ is threatened by the concept of poverty. The behavioral poverty theory blames people for their impoverished state. 50.2 Million people are in a food insecure household which represents 23.3% of all children. Conservatives, in order to cut social programs, demonized the poor and classified them as immoral through anecdotal myths. Clients Name Name of Professor Name of Class Date Poverty in America The United States was founded on the ideology of equality, although much of that equality took decades, even centuries, to come close to achieving. The nation is still a work in progress, a continuing social experiment that has the potential to reach a state of enlightened social construction. However, one of the core principles that has framed the ideology of the country has been the principle of the â€Å"American dream†. This dream is based upon the idea that through the freedoms that have been established through law and th rough the beliefs that have become ingrained within the culture, every person can find success. However, while opportunity does exist, the paths to opportunity are fraught with obstacles that not everyone can endure. Poverty has become an obscenity against the concept of â€Å"the land of opportunity† to the point that in some instances it has been criminalized. Cultural belief systems have made it a state of moral decay as well as financial Because of the cultural discourse on poverty, the needs of those who have suffered so many losses that recovery is next to impossible without assistance are so poorly addressed that recovery from poverty is near impossible. In the 1970s and 1980s, a shift was seen in the way that the public considered the state of poverty. In the1980s when Ronald Reagan took the office of the President of the United States, one of his goals was to change the way in which the welfare system addressed the issue of poverty. The amount of resources that were devoted to public assistance were considered too high by the conservatives and reframing the nature of poverty seemed to be the best recourse in lowering the amount of money spent on social services. Therefore, the concept of behavioral poverty was invented which was a theory that looked at the behavior of individuals as being responsible for their financial position rather than socio-economic problems that needed to be addressed. Behavioral poverty outlines a series of behaviors that are connected to being poor. Three behaviors were identified as being central to combating poverty and the behaviors that lead to poor financial resources: â€Å"completing high school, once an adult, get married and stay married (even if not on the first try), and stay employed, even at a wage and under conditions below their ultimate aims† (Stoesz 70). The foundational belief, however, is that the way to combat poverty is to go back to work. Therefore, in order to support this belief system, t he government constructed guidelines and requirements that must be followed in order to qualify for welfare in order to promote a return to work for those who are suffering from impoverished conditions (Stoesz 71). New Paternalism is a set of social policies that are intended as â€Å"a prescription for alleviating behavioral poverty. If the poor suffered from poverty other than absence of cash, and this was attributed to volition, the a logical policy outcome would be to