18,000 would be a liveable wage if not for many factors. Enough factors that everyone in that wage range is ensnared in at least a few. Lets start with the people who make less than 18k a year. 18k in California is not the same as 18k in Kansas which is not the same as 18k in Florida. The cost of living varies dramatically from state to state and also tends to be higher the more urban an area is. The big cities in the big taxation states tend to have the highest costs of living in the US. In those cities they get a double whammy. 18k a year is not a livable wage in most of the country. It is just a matter of degree in the hardship, not whether or not people experience hardship.
Retirees, people on disability and other fixed incomes rarely exceed 18k a year unless they have a job and or other retirement benefits besides Gov funding.
The working poor. Typically single income families working blue collar, entry level white collar, low rung trades, manual labor, retail and many other industries. Many factory workers make a pittance and unions would just remove the job rather than raise the pay.
The unemployed. In todays employer's market the unemployed are often able to find just enough work to stave off total catastrophe but rarely find work before unemployment benefits are exhausted. Unemployment benefits are in I believe all states far less than poverty level for the max benefit rate.
Young people fresh in the job market. Often they take any work that will give them experience. Without experience there is no hope of breaking into their chosen field. Students are in a worse boat. Often students make less than 18k and have to pay higher education costs on top of living expenses. Many H1 Visa employees also fall in this category. For them 18k is a fortune in the home country. Every penny they can save will be exponentially give them a better standard of living at home when they return.
Immigrants often find the first several years in this country to be difficult. Illegal immigrants even more so. Few make more than 18k a year.
The mentally ill. At least a majority of seriously mentally ill people in this country do not have the faculties nor the support to get help of any sort. What programs and charities exist are constantly swamped. A large portion of the homeless could not hold a job if they did everything in their power to do so. Some might be able to return to a mostly normal life if they were able to get and stay on appropriate medications. Many mental illness's by definition are non-compliant in taking medications. Many medications have severe side effects which cause non-compliance. When not on medication they slide or in some cases dive into states which prevent positive interactions with other people and in more severe cases these people become threats to property and others. An example the guy in New York City who pushed a woman to her death in the subway a few years back.
There are more groups but I think you get the idea. There is no one solution as there are so many people who live below poverty levels for so many reasons. Some of these groups have benefits which give a little compensation such as health care and food supplements. Some groups even get housing allowances/help.
To survive people who make sub-poverty level wages have to be resourcefull. Housing is one of the most expensive costs and by rooming the costs are slashed. Often large groups of people will live under the same roof to reduce expenses. Bicycles are the new mode of transportation for the poor in areas where public transportation is unavailable or too expensive. Some charities will help with utilities and food. A tiny percentage of medical clinics will work with uninsured people and reduce the costs for low income recipients. Some areas have blanket medical coverage for the poor. Still medical costs are an almost universal problem for people living below the poverty line. Whether it be a retiree with prescription costs that exceed or are not covered by Medicaid to the working poor who cannot afford insurance or work where insurance is not available. Even a simple $10 co-pay can be daunting when you make less than 18k a year.
The poor buy in bulk. They cook more, eat out rarely. Entertainment is a luxury many do without. The poor drive ancient cars which often carry crippling repair costs. The poor are exposed to toxic chemicals more often as they are more likely to live and work in dangerous areas. The hammer of crime falls heaviest on the poor, who are ironically the ones least able to afford losses. The poor often cut corners by not insuring vehicles, homes and deffinitely not property. When they have insurance it is the least they can legally get away with and often out of date as they are unable to pay the bill when it comes due. Mostly the poor do without things treated as normal or even essential by more affluent people. Some live without electricity or hot water during certain times of the year.
To survive being poor you have to be carefull not to live/move through law enforcement hot zones. Being poor means trouble with the law. It is the poor who cannot afford insurance, who drive with expired tags, inspection stickers and bald tires. It is the poor who cannot afford to pay tickets. While it is possible to avoid some tickets such as speeding tickets, if you drive through the wrong areas driving with the flow of traffic makes you vulnerable to such a ticket. Not driving with the flow of traffic makes you a hazard to traffic and attracts the notice of law enforcement who will think you are driving so carefully because you have something to hide. Once you get a ticket and cannot pay a vicious cycle starts that often leads to losing everything. Poorer areas tend to be hotbeds of crime and drugs. They also are areas where people are less likely to be aware of their rights and have the means to redress any violations of those rights. So the poor are ideal targets for law enforcement agencies. Tickets do not get overturned by the poor. Arrests stick. Violations are easy to find. Ticket quotas are easily met.
The cycle of poverty is a truly vicious one in the US. Whole industries prey on them. Taxes and regulations hit them the hardest. Often they are ineligible for benefits of any sort from the Gov or any charitable help. Higher education is not even a wisp of a dream unless they can find a scholarship for which they qualify. So a person of the right ethnic background, sex and who lives in the right region with an interest in the correct discipline might find a scholarship but they rarely have the resources to even look much less scour the offerings. If they do find one typically they will be competing with dozens or hundreds of others for the same scarce offerings.
What we can do to open doors and ease the hardships associated with poverty is quite a bit. The first thing is to repeal repressive taxes. Gasoline taxes, cigarette taxes, employment taxes and such. These hit the poor disproportionately. Smoking rates have declined significantly among the affluent while staying roughly the same or increasing for lower income brackets. So cigarette taxes hit those least able to afford them. To make matters worse, attempting to quit smoking during financial crisis is to make a difficult task nearly impossible. The working poor is especially hard hit by gas taxes. They are the most likely to have to commute to work. Construction workers, janitors, food service workers and such need what work exists. This work is rarely in the neighborhoods in which the poor can afford to live. Even in areas with well developed mass transit. People need to drive to attend functions, schools, move and many other reasons. The spat of emissions requirements is killing the poor. The poor drive older and cast off vehicles. The same vehicles who cannot pass emissions tests. There are better ways to reduce emissions. What emissions testing does is prevents poor drivers from either driving or adds expenses to people who cannot afford them to start with. Tickets, increased vehicle inspection fees. Maintenance increases. For many poor it is the choice of eventually going to jail or not working at all. For most living in poverty it is a life of rotating bills and paying the least amount which will result in something getting shut off or repossessed.
Another repressive measure is late fees. There are affluent customers of utilities, credit cards and other bills who forget to pay bills, get fiscally tied up occasionally or are otherwise late. The chronically late are usually the poor who really cannot afford to pay the bills. They juggle them till eventually it comes apart. Apartments, utilities and other such entities make a fortune preying on the poor with late fees. It is a slap in the face to somebody who could not afford the original bill much less the new bill with a $30 or more late fee. Some apartment complexes have Gestapo like attitudes with compound late fees. Late a few days and the late fees can become a substantial portion of the costs of living. Same with utilities. Banning the use of late fees or at least significantly curbing them would do more to help the poor than a hundred health care plans. Late fees eat the poor alive. Think about this example. Somebody taking home say $1,000 a month. They have typically 4-6 bills which incur an average of $25 late fees a month. That is %10 or more of their income each month going to late fees.
Lending institutions, insurance scams, mortgage companies, check cashing agencies and a host of other entities have grown up to feed off the poor and desperate. Some mortgage companies love to use variable rate mortgages as a hook. Without one it is apartment living with it's own set of expenses. With a variable rate mortgage, one day the piper comes to visit and the results are not pretty. Basically the scam is lend money to somebody who is desperate. Charge late fees, inspection fees and a host of other costs. Closing costs already sucked the lender dry to start with. Once the lendee is unable to pay then repossess or forclosure ensues. The lendee's credit is further destroyed thus making them easier prey for other institutions like this. For example if your credit rating drops to a certain point you cannot even open a bank account. Without a bank account you are forced to use check cashing agencies in many cases. So your $1,000 take home is reduced further. Insurance costs, especially in large metro areas can be just plain unaffordable for the poor. Many of these areas legally require insurance. With the major companies priced out of reach scam insurance companies will give you a piece of paper that can get your car registered. They will also deluge you with a host of expenses. Late fees, up front costs for reinstatement, refusal to pay on claims if needed and so on. No region or area should ever legally mandate insurance without providing an affordable alternate.
Health insurance and Gov health programs like medicare crush the poor. The working poor cannot afford insurance. If they can it is typically a plan that cuts corners. Lots of them, sometimes to the point that having a given plan is occasionally fatal as standard care is not allowed by plan, nor are the Doctor's treating the patient allowed to even inform the patient of the standard treatment for a given condition. What is the biggest problem is insurance exponentially increases the cost of health care. A normal doctor's office will have insurance as much as a third or more of it's operation expenses. It is not unusual to have at least one dedicated clerk that does nothing but deal with insurance claims. Postage, phone/fax costs, paperwork, interest accrued on debts while waiting sometimes over a year before receiving payment from the Gov or an insurance company. Time spent by the owners dealing with insurance snarls. Then there are the claims which are never paid. Normal operating procedures with many insurance agencies and even the Gov is to not pay the full costs. It is also I have heard illegal to charge less for cash pay customers. Cash pay is more likely to be the poor. So if a medical facility wants to make it's expenses and profit everybody pays exaggerated fees. This is a problem that feeds itself. Insurance companies watching their own profit margins cut more corners, which cause medical facilities to react and so on. Those hit hardest are the poor in this inflationary spiral. It would cut most peoples health care costs by at least a third if health insurance for non-catastrophic illness was banned.
Law suits are another major problem. One the poor have brought upon themselves for the most part. Many poor looking to get quick money will sue at the drop of a hat. This raises the costs for everybody, which of course hurts the poor the most. Who then become poorer and more susceptible to ambulance chasers and to quick money schemes. Reforms in this area have done little to help. They have actually aggravated the problem. Caps are often less than the cost of care for a seriously injured person for example doomed to a life of exorbitant medical costs. Somebody has to pay those costs one way or another. If it was truly a case of negligence by an employer for example. Then why cap the costs with a monetary amount? Why not just make them responsible for the bills and possibly a capped punitive award for example? If not the employer then we all pay. Frivolous law suits on the other hand are still just as lucrative as ever. Deep pocketed corporations will settle rather than go to court as it is just plain less expensive. The profit margin is not going to go down, the costs are just passed on to the consumer. A third way this hurts is many potential benefits for the poor have been removed because of the fear of of a lawsuit. A fast food place for example worried that leftover food might get them sued will instead throw the food away. Food that could have gone to a homeless shelter or people living under the poverty line. Medical providers, grocery stores and a host of other businesses which might have helped in the past have been forced to not do so for fear of a spurious law suit.
Jobs and education are of course the best ways to fight poverty. Immigration legal or illegal has become a serious problem in this country. A more serious problem is outsourcing. Plain and simple a service based economy is another way of spelling third world nation. If you do not produce a goods of some sort then you will be at the whims of other countries citzens who do produce goods. Industry after industry has fallen prey to this as factories and facilities are moved overseas. Greedy CEOs and short sighted unions have been the main factor in driving US jobs overseas. The IT industry is being shredded in the US by outsourcing. The ripple effect is coming soon as service and trades who depended on IT worker as a significant portion of their clientele will no longer have that revenue. This of course will mean fewer jobs in other service industries, which spreads like a chain reaction. So the penny saved this quarter will cost a company tens of thousands five years down the road or even might doom the company. Shareholders and the board see only the bottom line from quarter to quarter and this short sightedness has been crippling our economy for years.
Raising the minim wage is worthless in trying to help the poor. It costs jobs at best and causes inflation. Workers that once made decent livable wages are eventually swallowed by the minim wage increases as their wages increase slower than the increases in the minim wage. This creates yet another group of poor making minium wage. That is why paramedics, soldiers and many other proffessions are now living below the poverty level. Taxation is brutal to the poor. Even if they are exempt from income tax other taxes affect them greatly. Employer taxes for example discourage jobs. Jobs that are desperately needed. They also reduce the wages an employer can pay. The best way to increase wages is to create an employee's market. Where instead of a glut of job seekers you have a glut of jobs. This makes it good business sense to increase wages, benefits and improve job conditions and employers will do so willingly.
Ending ticket quotas would be something which helped the poor greatly. Tickets for non-compliance should be handled differently. A means of working off debts rather than jailing offenders should be created. A means of avoiding the offense such as insurance and inspection stickers likewise would go a long ways. Employment taxes should be banned.