Blog # 5

Chaudry argues that “we are asking the less fortunate to strive and work harder, we are deeply discounting our public responsibility for the children born into poor families and disadvantaged communities” (p.14) because he believes that we could have replaced welfare with more support and opportunites for children in addition to strong work requirements. While we were sitting there telling the poor families to work harder and do better, we weren’t thinking about what would be done with these children. People want poor people to stop being “lazy” and get out there and work, but then these people do not want to assist the poor people with taking care of their children, what do they expect these children in poverty to do while their parents are out trying to make a living and work harder because other people told them to? In one of the videos, it starts off with a man defining the working poor as people who go to work and earn a wage, but still don’t have enough money to pay rent or make a house payment or buy food and medicine for their kids. Another man says that the working poor are people who work full time jobs and still can’t make ends meet because of the cost of housing, cost of food, and cost of insurance. This video helped support Chaudry’s perspective that the issue is a public one and not a personal one because all these people blame the reason the poor people are poor because of the cost of things. Almost every single person that answered the question of who are the poor working class stated that they were people who worked, for minimum wage, but still could not pay things. The public, or should I say the government, are the people that set prices on things, they have the power to do something about it, they have the power to change it, so the working poor are the public’s problem because the poor people are working and trying to make a living, but what they make hourly and what they have to pay for doesn’t match up, so they cannot keep up.