Low Income Households Quotes

Poverty is not a lack of character. Poverty is a lack of cash.

… there are a great many people who not only can make no budget but can barely manage to exist with their families on what they earn from day to day

The biggest and most deadly 'tax' rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefits - food stamps, housing subsidies and the like - if their income goes up.

My family has been poor and working-class for generations. And we live - I live in this really small community in Southern Mississippi where you don't evacuate, and you have never evacuated because there are too many people in your family to evacuate.

Thirteen thousand dollars a year is not enough to raise a family. That's not enough to pay your bills and save for their future. That's barely enough to provide for even the most basic needs.

It's pretty rare to just talk to people who are having a tough time in the economy, to hear their individual stories.

America's vast population of working poor can only get so poor before even Walmart is out of reach.

I started when I was 39 as a cabinet secretary, and so I feel like I have lived an experience in my life where I can relate to families that struggle, and are scraping by and scrounging.

There's a real sense of desperation when you grow up in poverty.

When I was a kid in Houston, we were so poor we couldn't afford the last 2 letters, so we called ourselves po'.

The minimum wage has not kept pace with rising costs. This legislation is overdue and will help families that are struggling in this harsh economy.

I live in a working-class community that is struggling at the poverty line, where people who work full-time jobs still at my corner bodega use food stamps. Do you think they care what the stock market's doing today or what the GDP number is? No.

Emotional appeals about working families trying to get by on $4.25 an hour are hard to resist. Fortunately, such families do not exist.

Appalachia, my state, eastern Kentucky, has a large amount of poverty.

The typical minimum wage earner is a provider and a breadwinner - most likely a woman - responsible for paying bills, running a household and raising children.

Trailer home borrowers, mostly near the bottom of the economic ladder, often default on their loans.

I talk to the guy who busted his butt all week to buy a color TV, and the woman who's raising her kids, the people I owe a debt to. I'm talking to people in hotel rooms, lonesome people.

Poverty affects people of all races.

The extreme profligacy, improvidence, and misery which are so prevalent among the laboring classes in many countries are chiefly to be ascribed to the want of education.

There is a hugely underserved population out there... those who are the least capable of paying pay the highest.

Thanks to welfare's Catch-22, families receiving benefits cannot save for the future.

Films set in 90210 are ten a penny. But there's rarely room to make films about a different postal code, to show the lives of ordinary Americans who have to live with very limited material resources.

Increased funding for the Weatherization Assistance Program is a priority for the Bush Administration, and I am pleased that many families in North Carolina will benefit from this increase.

I know what it's like to have to put back food at the checkout line because you don't have enough money and those kinds of things.

Many blue-collar families struggling to pay rent would be happy to skip paying optional union dues.