“Most of the people I write about in this book do not have the luxury of rage. They are caught in exhausting struggles. Their wages do not lift them far enough from poverty to improve their lives, and their lives, in turn, hold them back.”

The phrase “the luxury of rage” is striking because anger is not something normally associated with privilege and indulgence. Nevertheless, as Shipler describes the exhausting struggles of his subjects and the general misery of their lives, he implies that active and socially-aware members of society should feel rage on their behalf.

“The term by which they are usually described, ‘working poor,’ should be an oxymoron. Nobody who works hard should be poor in America.”

In stating that nobody who works hard should be poor in America, Shipler sets a polemic, emotional tone for the beginning of the book. The term "working poor" is an oxymoron because it is paradoxical that work, which typically earns the worker money, should still leave him poor.

“‘Poverty’ is an unsatisfying term, for poverty is not a category that can be delineated merely by the government’s dollar limits on annual income. In real life, it is an unmarked area along a continuum, a broader region of hardship than the society usually recognizes.”

Shipler here sets out the premise that poverty cannot merely be defined by numerical statistics but is instead experienced in multiple complex ways. Therefore, someone who is above or around the government’s dollar limits on annual income could still experience poverty.