Note that she voluntarily gave up a full time public-sector job (emergency services dispatcher) with a decent salary to go on benefits.
Why does she have a child if she doesn't have the income to support them? Where is the father?
Details are slightly unclear because not everyone's employment and sexual history is on the internet for the benefit of their book reviewers, but it appears that the shiftwork required of the job made it extremely hard to find childcare, and the cost of childcare+commuting to work made working non-viable.
I've no idea where the father is, you could ask about for him? As for the "shouldn't have child" argument, you can't return children for a refund when you become unemployed nor can you ebay them to recoup your costs.
She addresses this in a Guardian article:
> When I returned to work after maternity leave, my relationship broke down, and I found it impossible to cover the irregular night shifts 30 miles from home with any form of childcare. Childminders just don't work all night. Her son's father did and does look after him, but at the time it was impossible to match our work shifts up with friends, family and childcare to cover my working hours. Because he works too.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/01/richard...
Most of your questions are answered here: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/01/richard...
"Why does she have a child?"
News for you: Sometimes people's circumstances can change. It's impossible to be sure you're income will be stable for 20 years.
There's a certain segment in American politics who really doesn't like to talk about this, but for all the drama, the poor in America are still better off than they are in almost any other country, which, yes, includes all (AFAIK) the European countries, and while that doesn't prove anything about what we do or do not need to do in that area, it does suggest that rhetoric about poverty in the US can occasionally get overblown. (It's a political thing where, let's be honest, there's a lot of incentives to keep promising more. I started listing them all out and the list of people interested in increasing poverty payouts got too long for a parenthetical. Again, not necessarily a complaint, but let's not pretend here that these interests don't exist. If you'd like, celebrate that often comes from something so crass as base political pandering ends up benefiting so many people, instead of a narrow interest group.)
I live in the Midwest and I don't know anyone living in abject poverty, but I know a lot of struggling families (as in, friends of the family that we socialize with frequently, not just "people I've heard of"). There's plenty of them that could afford $44, if you were somehow bringing something to them that was worth it. Which is, after all, the entire point here, to bring them something that will somehow improve their lives more than the cost of buying it, not to just pointlessly drain their wallets. This may very well only work right now in the US, where, yes, even the poor and struggling can afford $44, if it's worth it somehow. And on the flip side, while it's perhaps harder than you might initially think to bring $44 of value to somebody, it is also a very feasible goal. You don't have to work out how to bring them $5000 of value. (Although if you can somehow, awesome. That said the only thing that leaps to mind where you can pay back thousands for a small investment is budgeting apps, and that space is covered. The problem there wouldn't so much be writing the app as getting people to use it.)
While in high school, my mother finally left my father, taking my sister and me with her. Shortly afterward, she was incapacitated by cancer. My father would not have me back.
I continued to attend high school in spite of my homelessness. I was able to get a job at a restaurant that was a little lax on following labor law, and, initially, what I ate on the job was most of my meals (it was not allowed). I closed, so had keys to the building, and would come extra early and bathe in the dish washing sinks before the prep cooks arrived, then off to school.
I could never have afforded an electronic toy, and especially not the service plan that would come with it. And, no, minors do not get public assistance, if silly enough to try they will end up in foster care which more often than not means someone who wants the child simply to receive the monthly allowance for his "care". Even homeless shelters must turn away unaccompanied minors who come to their doors.
Eventually, I attended a good public university, but it was a long road. I do not want any longer, but I went hungry plenty-- I was 6 foot tall and 130lbs with as broad a build as you are likely to find, yet a rail.
Really? My understanding was that without state-subsidized healthcare, many don't have access to non-emergency healthcare, and so miss out on the kind of preventative measures that can do a lot for your general health. So while the American poor might be wealthier in some narrow sense than the European poor, their quality of life is worse than in nations with state healthcare.
Note the difference between "overstated" and "false", and I'll even more explicitly say that that isn't proof that everything's hunky dory and nothing needs to be changed. But it's hardly like it's paradise for the poor in Europe and in the US you're just left out on your own... it's way more nuanced than that. (Everybody's books have to balance.)
Brit here. Enlighten me as to how not being able to afford to visit a GP is 'overstated'.
As I understand it, if you are poor in the USA, there's a real chance you won't be able to pay for the pills you need, or for mental health treatment, etc. That simply doesn't happen here in the UK.
> Everybody's books have to balance.
But that doesn't mean anything. Different countries invest different amounts in welfare.
The U.S. government does provide health care programs for people below a certain income threshold.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicaid
The trouble comes when you are just over the threshold, but still can't afford health insurance, or just didn't bother to sign up. Or have insurance, but the part it didn't cover bankrupts you anyway.
So if we exclude those people from the "poor" category, perhaps "the poor's lack of access to health care is also overstated" makes a little more sense.
SNAP policies (supplemental nutrition assistance ie. food stamps) can vary greatly from state to state too. I've lived in states that provide unconditional benefits to anyone below a certain income level, but my current state (Florida), only provides a few months of benefits at a time, and then after that you have to continually re-qualify, providing proof that you're still looking for work if you're unemployed, things like that. It's incredibly easy to fall through the cracks with these proof requirements though.
Being poor certain places in the US is misery. People do go hungry plenty, and adults and especially children often suffer severe lasting health problems from malnutrition here.
I know this stuff from personal experience.
Go to a city. Any notable city. Detroit, Flint, Chicago, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Columbus. You'll see plenty of poverty, if you spend just five minutes to look for it.
http://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2014/01/05/poverty-map/ click "Number Living in Poverty" and then look at the midwest. It's everywhere. Every major city, and a number of rural areas (Tippecanoe County, Isabella County, Allen County, etc)
There's poverty all over the Midwest. If you don't see it, you aren't looking very closely.
This is not a political thing.