Poverty: The Forest And The Trees By Marcia Lusted

A poor mother of seven children whom desperately is looking for help to feed and clothed her children, but the help did not come until the first of each month. Standing in those long lines at the food bank, at the social service office to get government aid, such things as powered milk, powered eggs and blocks of cheese just to name a few. Yet again she was looking for help to keep the old torn down house warm in the winter and cool in the summer. But in the 1970 's, there was no assistance from the town to help with utilities and many of days and nights the mother and seven children went to sleep cold and hot. This story told is about the life of my mother, siblings and myself. An excerpt from the book The Forest and the Trees says, "The magnitude of poverty is especially ironic in a country like the United States whose enormous wealth dwarfs that of entire continents. More than one out of every seven people in the United States lives in poverty or near-poverty" (Johnson, 2014).

Why is this so? Why does the most powerful and richest country in the world have poverty? Especially when there is an abundance of help and economic power. If that question can be answered, most assured that person would …show more content…
She talks about the underlying causes of poverty in the United States and in developing countries. She states, “One of the most basic causes in poverty is overpopulation, or having too many people in a limited space” (Lusted, 2010). Of course these applies to the developing countries but one of the causes in the United States is down trends in the country’s economy, she states that in 2008 the United States began experiencing weak economy and jobs became very difficult to obtain (Lusted, 2010). This is a direct correlation to people living in poverty, they are stuck in that same rat race with no way to pull themselves up from the