Poverty in the United States

The United States is one of the few developed nations without a system of family allowances. Many social insurance theoreticians and welfare economists propose a system of family allowances under the OASDHI program to help meet the hard-core poverty problem in the United States. This paper analyzes empirically the desirability and limitations of family allowances in reducing poverty. The central thrust of the paper is devoted to the proposition that a system of family allowances is a costly and inefficient technique for reducing the remaining hard-core poverty in the United States. Considerable attention is devoted currently to poverty in the United States and the need for new public income maintenance programs to help the hard-core poor. New proposals include the negative income tax and guaranteed minimum income plans, reforms in public assistance, substantial improvements in the OASDHI program, and work and wage guarantees. In addition, many social insurance theoreticians propose a system of family allowances (FA) to reduce the remaining poverty in the United States.' George E. Reida, Ph.D., C.L.U., is Professor of Economics at the University of Nebraska. Dr. Rejda is the recipient of three N.A.I.I. Journal awards and serves currently as Communications Co-Editor of this Journal. He held a Huebner Foundation Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Rejda has also served as a staff consultant to The President's National Advisory Panel on Insurance in Riot-Affected Areas. The author wishes to thank Professor C. Arthur Williams, Jr., University of Minnesota, Professor Wallace Peterson, Chairman, Department of Economics, University of Nebraska, and Professor Thomas Nitsch, Economics Department, Creighton University, for their penetrating and critical comments of an earlier draft of this paper. The views expressed in this paper, however, are those solely of the author. This article was submitted in June, 1969. 1 See Children's Allowances and the Economic Welfare of Children, The Report of a Conference, Eveline M. Burns. ed. (New York: CitiAlthough FA plans exist in sixty-two foreign nations, including Canada, Great Britain, France, Denmark, and Sweden,2 the United States does not presently employ this technique to meet the income maintenance needs of the population. The primary purpose of this paper is to analyze empirically the desirability and limitations of FA plans for reducing poverty in the United States. Other aspects of FA plans are beyond the scope of the paper. The central thrust of this paper is devoted to the proposition that FA plans are ineffective and costly techniques for reducing the remaining hardcore poverty in the United States. Poverty is defined here as an insufficiency of material goods and servicesthe basic needs of individuals and famizen's Committee for Children of New York, Inc., 1968). 2 U.S., Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Guaranteed Minimum Programs Used By Governments Of Selected Countries, Paper No. 11, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1968), p. 10. 3 For a complete discussion of FA plans, see James Vadakin, Family Allowances (Miami: University of Miami Press, 1958) and Victor Gerdes, Social Security And Family Income Requirements, The Journal of Risk and Insurance, Vol. XXXIII, No. 2 (June, 1966), pp. 225-35.

Child poverty in the United States is higher than in most other advanced industrialized countries and has negative effects on children’s development and educational attainment. We review the factors that contribute to this high rate, examine its consequences for children, and document that a number of feasible policy reforms could reduce poverty and increase opportunities for poor children.

Introduction: Looking at Ourselves -Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann and Claude E. Welch, Jr. PART I. PHILOSOPHY, LAW, AND POLITICS OF ECONOMIC RIGHTS Justifying Socioeconomic Rights -Brian Orend 2. International Law of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: A U.S. Perspective -David Weissbrodt 3. On the Margins of the Human Rights Discourse: Foreign Policy and International Welfare Rights -David P. Forsythe and Eric A. Heinze PART II. POVERTY 4. Homelessness in Canada and the United States -Barbara Wake Carroll 5. Welfare Racism and Human Rights -Kenneth J. Neubeck 6. The Movement to End Poverty in the United States -Mary Bricker-Jenkins and Willie Baptist PART III. CONTENTIOUS AND EMERGING ISSUES 7. So Close and Yet so Different: The Right to Health Care in the United States and Canada -Virginia A. Leary 8. International Labor Rights and North American Labor Law -James B. Atleson 9. Deconstructing Barriers: The Promise of Socioeconomic Rights for People with Disabilities in Canada -Sarah Armstrong, Mindy Noble, and Pauline Rosenbaum 10. The Economic Rights of Migrants and Immigrant Workers in Canada and the United States -Vic Satzewich PART IV. A EUROPEAN COMPARISON 11. The Netherlands: A Walhalla of Economic and Social Rights? -Peter R. Baehr Appendix 1. International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Appendix 2. Excerpts from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's State of the Union Address, January 6, 1941 Appendix 3. Excerpts from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's State of the Union Address, January 11, 1944 Abbreviations Contributors Notes Index Acknowledgments

Poverty in the United States: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics and Policy

Poverty is a major social problem in the United States: in 2014, the U.S. Census Bureau reported 46.7 million people living in poverty and an estimated 14.8 percent poverty rate. The poverty rate has been steadily increasing in the United States, with a 2 percent increase in 2012 over 2007. Federal and state governments have initiated many anti‐poverty programs, starting with the New Deal Program in the 1930s. With the advent of a new governance approach in the 1990s, many hierarchical bureaucratic government agencies were replaced with public, private, network, and collaborative approaches to solve this complex national problem. Tax expenditures, vouchers, and grants are the three major governance tools used by the U.S. federal and state governments to fight poverty. This article addresses three important programs—the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)—used in fighting poverty in the United States and discusses the problem of poverty, the effectiveness of these governance tools, suggestions for future research, and policy implications

Book review of Garth L. Mangum, Stephen L. Mangum and Andrew M. Sum, The Persistence of Poverty in the United States. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. $19.95 papercover. Elizabeth Warren.and Amelia Warren Tyagi, The Two-income Trap: Why Middle Class Mothers and Fathers are Going Broke. New York: Basic Books, 2003. $26.00 hardcover.

Nonprofit Management and LeadershipVolume 6, Issue 1 p. 103-111 Research Report The blue river of truth: Literature and philanthropy Robert H. Bremner, Robert H. Bremner Robert H. Bremner is professor emeritus of history at the Ohio State University in Columbus. Among his books are American Philanthropy; The Public Good: Philanthropy and Welfare in the Civil War Period; The Discovery of Poverty in the United States, and Giving: Charity and Philanthropy in History.Search for more papers by this author Robert H. Bremner, Robert H. Bremner Robert H. Bremner is professor emeritus of history at the Ohio State University in Columbus. Among his books are American Philanthropy; The Public Good: Philanthropy and Welfare in the Civil War Period; The Discovery of Poverty in the United States, and Giving: Charity and Philanthropy in History.Search for more papers by this author First published: Autumn (Fall) 1995 https://doi.org/10.1002/nml.4130060110 AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume6, Issue1Autumn (Fall) 1995Pages 103-111 RelatedInformation

Inequality and poverty in the United States: public policies for inclusive growthIncome inequality and relative poverty in the United States are among the highest in the OECD and have substantially increased over the past decades.These developments have been associated with a number of other worrying statistics, including low intergenerational social mobility and weak real income growth for many households.A more inclusive pattern of growth would require less pronounced gaps in outcomes and opportunities across social groups and a broader sharing of the benefits of growth.The present paper analyses the causes of US income inequality and relative poverty in an OECD context, especially the role of the tax-and-transfer system, and suggests public policies to promote inclusive growth.To a significant degree, high income inequality is attributable to the large dispersion of earned income, which should be addressed by reforming education, so as to provide disadvantaged students with the skills needed to fully realise their potential.In addition, taxes and transfers contribute less to income redistribution than in other OECD countries.If well designed, reforms that promote inclusive growth could also help reduce the market distortions resulting from the current tax-and-transfer system.In particular, phasing out personal and corporate tax expenditures that disproportionately benefit high earners would lower income inequality and improve resource allocation.As well, social transfers could be more effective in alleviating poverty through better targeting of the truly needy while reducing administrative complexity.

Energy inequity is an issue of increasing urgency. Few policy-relevant datasets evaluate the energy burden of typical American households. Here, we develop a framework using Net Energy Analysis and household socioeconomic data to measure systematic energy inequity among critical groups that need policy attention. We find substantial instances of energy poverty in the United States – 16% of households experience energy poverty as presently defined as spending more than 6% of household income on energy expenditures. More than 5.2 million households above the Federal Poverty Line face energy poverty, disproportionately burdening Black, Hispanic, and Native American communities. For solar, wind, and energy efficiency to address socioeconomic mobility, programs must reduce energy expenditures by expanding eligibility requirements for support and access to improved conservation measures, efficiency upgrades, and distributed renewables. We recommend the United States develop a more inclusive federal energy poverty categorization that increases assistance for household energy costs.

This study examines the influence of social welfare and tax policies on rates of chronic and transient poverty in the United States for the full population and subgroups. I use longitudinal...

In the fifty years since it was published, The Other America has been established as a seminal work of sociology. This anniversary edition includes Michael Harrington s essays on poverty in the 1970s and 80s as well as a new introduction by Harrington s biographer, Maurice Isserman. This illuminating, profoundly moving classic is still all too relevant for today s America. When Michael Harrington s masterpiece, The Other America, was first published in 1962, it was hailed as an explosive work and became a galvanizing force for the war on poverty. Harrington shed light on the lives of the poor from farm to city and the social forces that relegated them to their difficult situations. He was determined to make poverty in the United States visible and his observations and analyses have had a profound effect on our country, radically changing how we view the poor and the policies we employ to help them.

Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe: A World of Difference. By Alberto Alesina and Edward L. Glaeser. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 262 pages. $55.00 clothAlberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser's recent book, Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe, exemplifies the recent incursion of economists into the domains of political science and sociology. In thinking about welfare states, economists have traditionally been interested in their effects on the distribution of income and, above all, their implications for efficiency and growth. Alesina and Glaeser instead set out to explain why “Americans are much less willing to redistribute from the rich to the poor than Europeans” (2) or, in other words, why the American welfare state is so small by comparison to European welfare states. This, then, is a book about American exceptionalism in the realm of social policy, but Alesina and Glaeser's discussion also addresses the general problem of accounting for cross-national variation in the public provision of social welfare. Their project is to provide an account of the exceptional nature of the American welfare state that is consistent with and sheds light on differences among other welfare states as well. This makes for an audacious book that deserves critical scrutiny.Jonas Pontusson is Professor of Politics at Princeton University (jpontuss@Princeton.edu). This essay was written while I was a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. I am most grateful to the foundation for its support. For comments on previous drafts, I am grateful to Ira Katznelson, Mary O'Sullivan, and Kenneth Sokoloff.

Introducing the Issue Ron Haskins (bio) and Isabel Sawhill (bio) Ron Haskins Ron Haskins is senior editors of The Future of Children, co-directors of the Center on Children and Families, and senior fellows in the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution, where Sawhill holds the Cabot Family Chair. Haskins is also a senior consultant at the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Isabel Sawhill Isabel Sawhill is senior editors of The Future of Children, co-directors of the Center on Children and Families, and senior fellows in the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution, where Sawhill holds the Cabot Family Chair. Notes 1. John Cochran, "New Perspectives on Poverty," Congressional Quarterly Weekly, October 23, 2006, pp. 2802-09; Julie Kosterlitz, "Social Policy: The Katrina Experiment," National Journal, November 5, 2005, pp. 3436-42; Jason DeParle, "Liberal Hopes Ebb in Post-Storm Poverty Debate," New York Times, October 11, 2005, p. A1. 2. Jonathan Gruber and Gary Engelhardt, "Social Security and the Evolution of Elderly Poverty," in Public Policy and the Income Distribution, edited by Alan Auerbach, David Card, and John Quigley (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), pp. 259-87. 3. For further analyses of economic factors influencing poverty rates, see Hilary Hoynes, Marianne Page, and Ann Stevens, "Poverty in America: Trends and Explanations," Working Paper 11681 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, October 2005). 4. Adam Thomas and Isabel Sawhill, "For Love and Money? The Impact of Family Structure on Family Income," Future of Children 15, no. 2 (Fall 2005): 57-74; Hoynes, Page, and Stevens, "Poverty in America: Trends and Explanations" (see note 3). 5. Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill, "Work and Marriage: The Way to End Poverty and Welfare," Welfare Reform and Beyond Brief 28 (Brookings, September 2003); Isabel Sawhill and Adam Thomas, "A Hand Up for the Bottom Third: Toward a New Agenda for Low-Income Working Families," Working Paper (Brookings, May 2001). 6. Not all government spending counts in the calculation of income when the official poverty rate is calculated. But even if we use alternative Census Bureau definitions of poverty that include more government benefits in the definition of income, poverty has still increased in the face of the huge increase in government spending. 7. Nicholas Eberstadt, "Why Poverty Doesn’t Rate" (Washington: American Enterprise Institute, September 2006). 8. Fred Doolittle and Suzanne Lynn, Working with Low-Income Cases: Lessons for the Child Support Enforcement System from Parents’ Fair Share (New York: MDRC, 1998). 9. Leighton Ku and Matthew Broaddus, "Coverage of Parents Helps Children, Too" (Washington: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, October 20, 2006). 10. Isabel Sawhill, "Introducing the Issue," Future of Children 16, no. 2 (Fall 2006): 3-17; Isabel Sawhill, "Opportunity in America: Does Education Promote Social Mobility?" Future of Children Policy Brief (Fall 2006). 11. Pamela Morris, Lisa Gennetian, and Greg Duncan, "Effects of Welfare and Employment Policies on Young Children: New Findings on Policy Experiments Conducted in the Early 1990s," Social Policy Report 19, no. 2 (2005); Lisa A. Gennetian and others. How Welfare and Work Policies for Parents Affect Adolescents: A Synthesis of Research (New York: MDRC, 2002); Ron Haskins, Work over Welfare: The Inside Story of the 1996 Welfare Reform Law (Brookings, 2006). 12. Kasia O’Neill Murray and Wendell E. Primus, "Recent Data Trends Show Welfare Reform to Be a Mixed Success: Significant Policy Changes Should Accompany Reauthorization," Review of Policy Research 22 (2005): 301-24. [End Page 15] 13. Sara McLanahan, Elisabeth Donahue, and Ron Haskins, "Introducing the Issue," Future of Children 15, no. 2 (Fall 2005): 3-12. 14. Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips, eds., The Black-White Test Score Gap (Brookings, 1998); Cecilia Rouse, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, and Sara McLanahan, "Introducing the Issue," Future of Children 15, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 5-14. 15. Frances Campbell and others, "Early-Childhood Programs and Success in School: The Abecedarian Study," in Early Care and Education for Children in Poverty, edited by W. Steven Barnett and Sarane Spence Boocock (State University of New York, 1998), pp. 145-66; Frances Campbell and others, "Early Childhood Education: Young Adult Outcomes from the Abecedarian Project," Applied Developmental Science 6, no. 1 (2002): 42-57; and Lawrence...

Risk, Blackness, and Postcolonial StudiesAn Introduction Shona N. Jackson (bio) The critical arguments against postcolonial studies are well rehearsed and have led to a double approach to the field in academia. Some have advocated, for instance, for the rejection of postcolonial studies and its incursion into disciplines created out of the late-twentieth-century protest movements that spawned Black, Indigenous, and Ethnic Studies programs across the United States. These programs are in fact indebted to the global change wrought by the post WWII independence movements of Third World states and thus always already implicated in theoretical formulations of the postcolonial that return to them. They have done so with the hope of reviving the more decisively oppositional positions of the anticolonial era. Others have advocated the incorporation of postcolonial studies into predominant subfields already established in curricular areas such as Modern British Studies or for stand-alone programs. This latter approach is both allied with and critical of colonial and imperial epistemologies as they have shaped the academic disciplines; it thus lacks the oppositional situatedness that was possible in the anticolonial moment and that present-day Black Nationalist positions seek to recover. Thus the field is arguably characterized by what we can call, after Paul Gilroy, a hegemonic “melancholia.” As an explanatory tool that tries to make sense of anticolonial power struggle and postindependence, late capital transformations of power, what we term postcolonial theory shares an intimacy with power that renders it ineffective as a real-world oppositional strategy. The status of blackness in these debates is often neglected, specifically the way in which the creation of fields and subfields that examine race and power fragment and compartmentalize blackness. What are deemed diasporic investigations of black identity are often detached from United States based projects and programs. Indeed, outside of dedicated black diaspora programs, postcolonial studies is often the only place that those working on blackness outside the United States can become intelligible to US based institutions. Further, its methodologies are instrumental for grasping the formulation of power dynamics in social worlds that do not fit North American racial frameworks. Despite all its constitutive problems, the field continues to prove productive of thinking beyond singular modes of opposition and instead reconsider the range of complex and often contradictory positions held by those critical of late imperial and neocolonial power. It remains essential for making visible and intelligible research that does not fit into the balkanized categories of difference produced by predominantly white, academic departments, social worlds, and ways of knowing the colonial world. From this vantage point, blackness must be viewed not in terms of a singular dimensionality vis-à-vis white power and history but as a condition of being across time and within various moments, both antithetical to and generative of regimes of power. [End Page 63] To untangle the imbrication of blackness and postcoloniality in the early-twenty-first century, our section focuses on the question of risk. One can conceptualize risk in the field in manifold ways. While it is primarily understood in terms of economic theory, here I use it to rethink blackness in terms of broad and complex forms of subordination across time and within and outside nation-states. It is a way of accounting for the cultural and political distinctions that separate the anticolonial periods and strategies from the postcolonial; it is also a way of establishing links between the jeopardies endured by the black body in these moments as both distinct and continuous. Thinking risk in this manner may allow us to discern commonalities between various moments of crisis for blackness, such as the events around hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the recent anti-black legal rulings in the Dominican Republic. Katrina exposed the underbelly of black poverty in the United States and the risk faced by the black poor. It revealed clearly the continued subordination of blackness to white power and capital; it revealed, in other words, the United States’s own internal colonialism and was a sharp reminder of the fact that the coloniality of blackness in the United States was not eradicated by the Civil Rights gains of the 1960s. The 2013 decision by the Supreme Court to strike...

Childhood poverty increases the likelihood of adult poverty. However, past research offers conflicting accounts of cross-national variation in the strength of—and mechanisms underpinning—the intergenerational persistence of poverty. Here the authors investigate differences in intergenerational poverty in the United States, Australia, Denmark, Germany and the United Kingdom using administrative- and survey-based panel datasets. Intergenerational poverty is decomposed into family background effects, mediation effects, tax and transfer insurance effects and a residual poverty penalty. The intergenerational persistence of poverty is 0.43 in the United States (95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.40–0.46; P < 0.001), compared with 0.16 in the United Kingdom (95% CI = 0.07–0.25; P < 0.001) and 0.08 in Denmark (95% CI = 0.08–0.08; P < 0.001). The US disadvantage is not channelled through family background, mediators, neighbourhood effects or racial or ethnic discrimination. Instead, the United States has comparatively weak tax and transfer insurance effects and a more severe residual poverty penalty. If the United States were to adopt the tax and transfer insurance effects of its peer countries, its intergenerational poverty persistence could decrease by more than one-third.