How To Reduce Poverty In America

When you start speaking individually to poor families in America, many who do have incomes over the poverty line are still unable to meet the needs of their family, showing us that perhaps our measures of poverty are inaccurate, and the problem is even more prevalent than we can see.
Once poverty thresholds are standardized, America’s poverty rate is 5% higher than the average of the OECD.
Rates of poverty are highest among minorities. While 10% of white people live in poverty, the rates are significantly higher among blacks and Latinos at over 25%.
It’s a cyclical process. Reports of children from the bottom and top quintiles of earners compared show that children of the bottom quintile are less likely to “be ready for school at five. He is
While they grew by an average of 2.3% a year between 1947 and 1967, they’ve grown by a miniscule average of 0.2% over the last 30 years. Even worse though, they fell in response to the recession between 2007 and 2011 for the bottom 70% of American workers.
The Great Recession also saw a decline from 62-63% in the early 2000s to 59% in 2009 of the “proportion of the population of working age in the workforce”. It is commonly believed that it’s harder to get back into the workforce the longer you’re out, so this “could turn the temporary macroeconomic problem of high unemployment in the slump into a structural shift towards poverty”.
We also must consider the incredibly high incarceration rate in America, which plagues 37% of black young people without high school degrees. Having a prison record is correlated with lower earnings, more trouble holding down a job, and a lower likelihood of being married. “The eightfold growth in the prison population from 1970 to 2010 has turned ever more poor decisions into poor lives”.
Also, the “deteriorating family structure” must be taken into account. Impoverished children are most likely to be found in single-parent homes. Over one third of single mother households are poor, which is huge compared to the 7% of poor in households with married
Medicaid enrollment has grown yearly since 2008. Unemployment benefits awarded to 9.9 million households in 2011 were a staggering $113.3 billion, and other temporary assistance programs racked up $16.6 billion.
America tends to be resistant in offering cash transfers for those in poverty, and is more inclined to adjust tax code, letting families below certain incomes claim tax credits for each dependent child.
EITC, or the earned income tax credit, was first put in place in 1975. Since, it has flourished and been supported fully by democrats and republicans alike. It is for low to moderate income for working people, but it is particularly beneficial to families. It offers a percentage of an individual’s income, varying based on dependents and marital status. The EITC differs from the majority of tax credits because it is refundable, meaning that when a household’s EITC surpasses their tax liability, the difference is then refunded.
Studies of the Great Recession display the importance of anti-poverty programs such as the EITC. While the income and wealth of American households in the bottom quintile declined drastically, their levels of consumption did not shift. Anti-poverty programs did the job of boosting consumer spending