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Selling plasma to survive: how over a million American families live on $2 per day
http://www.vox.com/2015/9/2/9248801/extreme-poverty-2-dollarsReally good interview at Vox with two researchers who did fieldwork in several US cities and the Mississippi delta (where I'm from). Read the whole thing, but I really want to highlight one of the researcher's takeaway (emphasis mine):
We'd like to see policies that increase the supply of jobs for families at the bottom of the economic ladder, and we've got some recent models for that. As part of the 2009 stimulus package, there was subsidized jobs program through the TANF Emergency Fund. It provided about $1.3 billion in federal funds for states; 39 states plus DC took them up, and partnered with private employers to create positions. We have some good evidence that this had positive results for the people involved. It's a temporary thing that ended with the stimulus. We'd like to, as a first order of business, bring that back, maybe even make it a larger program.
We have to do some things to improve the quality of the jobs we have, such as toughening up oversight of labor standards. Let's start by doing a good job of enforcing what we have on the books. We'd like to see minimum wage increases and see what that does for improving equality, along with this program to increase the number of jobs. Then we turn to housing, which is itself part of the jobs problem. If people had more stable employment, it'd go a long way toward improving the housing problems. We need a bigger investment in our housing subsidies programs. There's a lot of evidence that that pays dividends, as well.
Finally, we think that we need to bring back some kind of cash safety net. People really just need cash when they're at the very bottom, when they're the poorest of the poor. They need a little bit of cash to get out of the circumstances they're in. When we see people selling their SNAP and losing 40 cents of every dollar they sell — if we provided a little bit of cash income, we could, without increasing what we spend, increase the value of what they get. We could give some of their SNAP in cash. The most obvious thing would be to fix the problems with TANF by closing some of the loopholes that incentivize states to keep their caseloads low.
The good news is that we see histories of labor force attachment even among the poorest families in America. So there's a possibility of providing a cash safety net that's pegged to past work. There's a couple of options for doing that outside the TANF system, but we could also just improve TANF so it's fulfilling the mission it was meant to fulfill in 1996. It was supposed to be temporary assistance for needy families. Let's actually make it that.
We have to do some things to improve the quality of the jobs we have, such as toughening up oversight of labor standards. Let's start by doing a good job of enforcing what we have on the books. We'd like to see minimum wage increases and see what that does for improving equality, along with this program to increase the number of jobs. Then we turn to housing, which is itself part of the jobs problem. If people had more stable employment, it'd go a long way toward improving the housing problems. We need a bigger investment in our housing subsidies programs. There's a lot of evidence that that pays dividends, as well.
Finally, we think that we need to bring back some kind of cash safety net. People really just need cash when they're at the very bottom, when they're the poorest of the poor. They need a little bit of cash to get out of the circumstances they're in. When we see people selling their SNAP and losing 40 cents of every dollar they sell — if we provided a little bit of cash income, we could, without increasing what we spend, increase the value of what they get. We could give some of their SNAP in cash. The most obvious thing would be to fix the problems with TANF by closing some of the loopholes that incentivize states to keep their caseloads low.
The good news is that we see histories of labor force attachment even among the poorest families in America. So there's a possibility of providing a cash safety net that's pegged to past work. There's a couple of options for doing that outside the TANF system, but we could also just improve TANF so it's fulfilling the mission it was meant to fulfill in 1996. It was supposed to be temporary assistance for needy families. Let's actually make it that.
A thousand times yes. We do way too much in-kind when what people really need is cash.
This kind of fieldwork is especially important because so much of our data is only collected on a quarterly or even annual basis: if you look at annual income, many of the $2/day families will be much closer to the poverty line. But that doesn't help in the lean months (particularly since they are mostly shut out of the banking system).
(Side note: when I was out of doors in Boston years ago a lot of people suggested I sell plasma, but I couldn't find where to go or how to do it and concluded it wasn't a thing anymore. Where do you find places that buy it?)
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returning home from 'nam where I sold my plasma for the 5 bucks it paid. I'm not ashamed of it nor am I proud of it. It was a way for me to get a few bucks to buy some food with until I got that first paycheck. Upon returning the left over blood into my body the last time I did it the person missed the vein in my arm and after a while I got concerned that my arm was swelling up so I bring it to their attention so they go to re-stick me when I said I believe I can survive without this pint of blood and left. It took a few days for my arm swelling to go down but it wasn't something I worried with. It taught me a lesson though and that lesson was to not do that again.
I don't like needles other than a sewing needle 
