The Undeserving Poor: America's Enduring Confrontation with Poverty: Fully Updated and Revised

This is just another in a vast armada of far left liberal books that works overtime trying to give the gifts of guilt and greif to anyone who has worked hard, played by the rules, avoided stupid life choices and done well. The book trots out all the same tired old reasons to explain poverty among the undeserving. Well I AM a BLACK MAN! I never abused illegal drugs. I never drank myself silly abusing alcohol. I never sold drugs or engaged in the kinds of criminality and gangland garbage that get's one arrested, convicted and ruined for life.I went to really bad inner city schools and survived in the blood soaked ghetto streets of Baltimore, Maryland without joining a gang or hurting others. To get away from hood rats and others in my neighborhood I spent my youth reading all sorts of books and watching movies in Baltimore's Central public library. To get away from bad people I walked around downtown learning about Baltimore's buildings, history and neighborhoods past and present. To avoid the dope fiends, gangs and dealers in my neighborhood I stopped at a few stores and brought cheap four for $1.00 ham sandwiches. To improve my work ethic, I volunteered helping others in prisons and mental hospitals learn how to read, do math and develop community living skills. I did volunteer work with community charity organizations, my church and other places in my community that needed help.I went to Maryland State vocational rehabilitation services and took classes in accounting in hopes it might lead to a good job which at the time it did not. I never gave up. I trying, applying for jobs, volunteering to improve my job and people skills. My being autistic made developing suitable workplace skills extremely difficult but I never gave up. I never just said well I'll just be happy collecting welfare or disability. This book tries to rationalize the fact that some people are just lazy. Some people choose to abuse drugs and alcohol knowing full well that addiction is the logical result of said actions. Stupid ladies and dumb men of any race choose to have babies they can not afford then want taxpayers to subsidize their mistakes. The parents are the undeserving poor, only the child born to foolish parents is deserving of our help.Eventually I pulled myself up out of poverty of life on Section 8, SSI and Social Security Disability Income. I went to college taking Computer Science classes at a community college. I leveraged my college education into the means to get a good job so my life experience proves you can move on up to a better socio-economic place in life. The problem is economic success does not just fall out of the sky or walk up to you on a ghetto drug infested corner and say hello I'm opportunity please take me. You must do leg work, you must hunker down and study. I have autism and 13 disabilities success did not just happen to me. I worked for 41 years before I had what it took to be successful in the job market, but I never gave up. I did not have babies I could not afford to take care of weighing me down. Yes I was POOR but I was no one's fool. I had a strong work ethic, I knew how to use the power of education to life me out of poverty, I knew drug abuse is for dopes and alcohol abuse is for fools and I was neither.This is just another book that says we are responsible for derilects who do everything in their power to ruin their lives then they want to call their failing a "disability!" No one will ever convince me that a person who has to buy booze or drugs every day to feed their so called "disability" is in any way handicapped beyond a profound stupidity. In this case the political conservatives are right and the liberal left is wrong. Sociologist's and doctors are working hard to remake immoral, drug abusing, alcoholic, loose ladies and ghetto dawg men into disabled victims of their home life, their genetics and anything else when they are just The Undeserving Poor. All the purfume and flowers in the world can't cover the fact that some people make their lives a festering pile of crap by choice not accident. The Undeserving Poor: America's Enduring Confrontation with Poverty is just more sweet smelling words trying to hide or worse rehabilitate lives turned into fetted cesspools of drugs, alcohol and profound willful stupidity by choice.

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This book provides a comprehensive and authoritative review of the literature of the late 19th Century to the present day concerning the causes and solutions to the problems of of poverty and racism in America's racial ghettos. The scholarship is impressive. Many of the best and brightest among us have addressed the subject but poverty in a racial context stubbornly remains. The author points outthat improvemnts have taken place but in the past decade poverty in the U.S. has expanded. The author assumes without ever proving that the problem stems from poverty and not from racism. I believe that in America poverty has become hopelessly intertwined with race, Nevertheless, this book is a must read because of its authoritative survey of the voluminous literature written on this suibject.

Mr. Katz has written an excellent analysis of the poverty problem in our wealthy country. We are living in a time when the gap between the haves and the have nots is widening. The safety net has holes in it. I don't mind rating the books I buy from Amazon but dislike this 20 words business. Sometimes I just do not have the time for a long, thoughtful review.

This is a great academic work detailing the history of public policy and philosophy on the poor and our approaches to eradicating or containing poverty. This is not a journalistic account of living among the poor or anything like that. As a social worker in public welfare for 32 years, I highly recommend this thorough book.

Great, well researched, a sociopolitical history of poverty in the US

Needed it for my SW policy grad class.

The book never substantiates its claims, it routinely dismisses ideas as liberal or conservative without proving fact or theory, besides it is excessively long