Three Driving Forces Of Poverty Analysis

According to the United States Census Bureau, in 2013, the official poverty rate was 14.5 percent. It may not seem like a staggering percentage, but in the end it does equate to 46.7 million Americans living below the poverty line (Ritzer 220). Since poverty has been a major increasing issue in the United States, what efforts have been made to stop it, or even slow it down? American society has become blind to what the lower class has to deal with on a day-to-day basis. Author of Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America, Linda Tirado, gives an applicable insight to the everyday struggles of the American lower class that connect with the issues described as a whole by George Ritzer in Introduction to Sociology. Many large-scale examples connect …show more content…
They are not just sitting around letting every opportunity slip by them. Sometimes it is the system that fails citizens. After all, poverty does exist all around the world. According to sociologists, there are three driving forces of poverty. First, poverty persists because it is virtually built into every capitalist system. According to Ritzer, “Capitalist businesses seek to maximize profits. They do so by keeping wages as low as possible and by hiring as few workers as possible. When business slows, they are likely to lay people off, thrusting most of them into poverty”(Ritzer 220). Business owners have to keep money flowing and if they have to lay off a few people so be it, as long as they continue to make a profit. If limiting job opportunities isn’t enough, elite groups find other ways to hold lower class citizens down. Here Ritzer says, “the elites [limit the ability of other groups] by limiting the poor’s access to opportunities and resources such as those afforded by various welfare systems” (Ritzer 220). Even the opportunities the lower class are suppose to be receiving are being held back. When the government is asked to step in to help they do little to nothing to help the poor. They are not willing to help because “they believe that government aid reduces people’s incentive to do on their own what they need to do to rise above the poverty line” (Ritzer 220). The government thinks they are a crutch that is just going to hold the hand of the lower class until they get where they need to be. So instead of being the crutch, they do nothing at all. Essentially the lower class is being told they need to work out of the conditions they live in now, but they are going to somehow do it while potentially being laid off as well as having little to no other opportunities to improve their well