Surviving in a world where money matters is not easy at all. Try living on less than a dollar and fifty cents a day. Go to a store and look for enough food for three meals with enough nutrients for a balanced diet, all on a budget of $1.50. Fresh fruits and vegetables and meat are out of the question, so what are the options? There really aren't any, except for a few canned and dried items. There are people who live from this every day. The number of people living in poverty exceeds 1.4 billion and is increasing every day. Society has not focused enough on social justice for people living in poverty. “Poor workers harvest sweet potatoes in time for Thanksgiving. They are cutting down trees in time for Christmas. The fruits of their labor are present in our daily lives, but we rarely see them. Even when we meet them face to face stocking the shelves at Wal-Mart or visiting us in the supermarket, we don't think of them as whole people, and we certainly don't think of them as poor people. They are hidden in plain sight” (Edwards). People are working minimum wage and barely getting enough government assistance to help them. These people work and continue to work to earn enough money to survive one day at a time. The opportunities available to the lower classes do not match those of the middle or upper classes. These classes all receive different benefits, but more importantly, those in poverty impact society as a whole. The federal minimum wage in the United States is $7.25 an hour, while in states like Washington it is $9.19. “In 2010, 72.9 million U.S. workers ages 16 and older were paid an hourly rate, representing 58.8 percent of all employees. Of those who were paid hourly, 1.8 million earned exactly the prevailing federal middle...... middle of paper...... to receive their salary. The number of people living in poverty around the world is increasing by the minute. If wages rose like they do in Latin America, fewer people would fall into poverty and would not need help from governments. “European Development Commissioner Andris Piebalgs said: '...Big challenges lie ahead: ensuring we achieve the Millennium Development Goals and making poverty a thing of the past. To move forward, we must all work together – the global community should agree on an ambitious common agenda for poverty eradication and sustainable development…” (Europa). Poverty is a problem all over the world, if all countries act together and campaign for the elimination of poverty, people who work on minimum wage will not experience this problem. Poverty would decrease and it would be as if it had never been a problem in the world.