How Many Americans Live on Less Than $2 Per Day?
I know this article is some two weeks old but I hadn't seen it posted anywhere. The report is shocking and a disgraceful indictment of this society. No matter who plays with the numbers and how, this level of poverty is appalling.
Slate
How Many Americans Live on Less Than $2 Per Day?
By Jordan Weissmann
27 August, 2014
This month, Stanford University’s Pathways magazine gave new meaning to the phrase “third-world America” when it published an article reporting that, in any given month of 2011, 1.65 million U.S. households with children were living on less than $2 per person, per day—the sort of extreme poverty threshold usually associated with developing nations. According to H. Luke Shaefer of the University of Michigan and Kathryn Edin of Johns Hopkins, the number of families living under that low, low line has grown 159 percent since 1996. This, they argued, may have partly been the result of Bill Clinton’s welfare reforms, which made it harder for many families to receive cash assistance.
“The prevalence of extreme poverty in the United States may shock many,” the pair wrote. But is it really as prevalent as they suggest? A new report from the Brookings Institution argues: maybe not.
Part of the reason Shaefer and Edin’s headline number was so startlingly high—they calculated that the extreme poverty rate among households with children was a chilling 4.3 percent—could be attributed to a very narrow definition of income that ignored all noncash safety net benefits. Today, most of the government’s poverty-fighting efforts don’t involve straightforward cash. Food stamps? Housing vouchers? Tax credits? None were included. Once they accounted for those programs, only 613,000 families were living below the $2-a-day mark in 2011—still up by about half since the Clinton years.
At a bare minimum, then, hundreds of thousands of American households are living in true destitution. (For a family of three, the federal poverty line works out to about $17 per day, per person.)
MORE at http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/08/27/extreme_poverty_in_america_how_many_live_on_less_than_2_per_day.html
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