essays about poverty in america

Why Poverty Persists in America

A Pulitzer Prize-winning sociologist offers a new explanation for an intractable problem.

A mother and son living in a Walmart parking lot in North Dakota in 2012. Credit... Eugene Richards

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By Matthew Desmond

• Published March 9, 2023 Updated April 3, 2023

In the past 50 years, scientists have mapped the entire human genome and eradicated smallpox. Here in the United States, infant-mortality rates and deaths from heart disease have fallen by roughly 70 percent, and the average American has gained almost a decade of life. Climate change was recognized as an existential threat. The internet was invented.

On the problem of poverty, though, there has been no real improvement — just a long stasis. As estimated by the federal government’s poverty line, 12.6 percent of the U.S. population was poor in 1970; two decades later, it was 13.5 percent; in 2010, it was 15.1 percent; and in 2019, it was 10.5 percent. To graph the share of Americans living in poverty over the past half-century amounts to drawing a line that resembles gently rolling hills. The line curves slightly up, then slightly down, then back up again over the years, staying steady through Democratic and Republican administrations, rising in recessions and falling in boom years.

What accounts for this lack of progress? It cannot be chalked up to how the poor are counted: Different measures spit out the same embarrassing result. When the government began reporting the Supplemental Poverty Measure in 2011, designed to overcome many of the flaws of the Official Poverty Measure, including not accounting for regional differences in costs of living and government benefits, the United States officially gained three million more poor people. Possible reductions in poverty from counting aid like food stamps and tax benefits were more than offset by recognizing how low-income people were burdened by rising housing and health care costs.

The American poor have access to cheap, mass-produced goods, as every American does. But that doesn’t mean they can access what matters most.

Any fair assessment of poverty must confront the breathtaking march of material progress. But the fact that standards of living have risen across the board doesn’t mean that poverty itself has fallen. Forty years ago, only the rich could afford cellphones. But cellphones have become more affordable over the past few decades, and now most Americans have one, including many poor people. This has led observers like Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill, senior fellows at the Brookings Institution, to assert that “access to certain consumer goods,” like TVs, microwave ovens and cellphones, shows that “the poor are not quite so poor after all.”

No, it doesn’t. You can’t eat a cellphone. A cellphone doesn’t grant you stable housing, affordable medical and dental care or adequate child care. In fact, as things like cellphones have become cheaper, the cost of the most necessary of life’s necessities, like health care and rent, has increased. From 2000 to 2022 in the average American city, the cost of fuel and utilities increased by 115 percent. The American poor, living as they do in the center of global capitalism, have access to cheap, mass-produced goods, as every American does. But that doesn’t mean they can access what matters most. As Michael Harrington put it 60 years ago: “It is much easier in the United States to be decently dressed than it is to be decently housed, fed or doctored.”

Why, then, when it comes to poverty reduction, have we had 50 years of nothing? When I first started looking into this depressing state of affairs, I assumed America’s efforts to reduce poverty had stalled because we stopped trying to solve the problem. I bought into the idea, popular among progressives, that the election of President Ronald Reagan (as well as that of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom) marked the ascendancy of market fundamentalism, or “neoliberalism,” a time when governments cut aid to the poor, lowered taxes and slashed regulations. If American poverty persisted, I thought, it was because we had reduced our spending on the poor. But I was wrong.

Reagan expanded corporate power, deeply cut taxes on the rich and rolled back spending on some antipoverty initiatives, especially in housing. But he was unable to make large-scale, long-term cuts to many of the programs that make up the American welfare state. Throughout Reagan’s eight years as president, antipoverty spending grew, and it continued to grow after he left office. Spending on the nation’s 13 largest means-tested programs — aid reserved for Americans who fall below a certain income level — went from $1,015 a person the year Reagan was elected president to $3,419 a person one year into Donald Trump’s administration, a 237 percent increase.

Most of this increase was due to health care spending, and Medicaid in particular. But even if we exclude Medicaid from the calculation, we find that federal investments in means-tested programs increased by 130 percent from 1980 to 2018, from $630 to $1,448 per person.

“Neoliberalism” is now part of the left’s lexicon, but I looked in vain to find it in the plain print of federal budgets, at least as far as aid to the poor was concerned. There is no evidence that the United States has become stingier over time. The opposite is true.

This makes the country’s stalled progress on poverty even more baffling. Decade after decade, the poverty rate has remained flat even as federal relief has surged.

If we have more than doubled government spending on poverty and achieved so little, one reason is that the American welfare state is a leaky bucket. Take welfare, for example: When it was administered through the Aid to Families With Dependent Children program, almost all of its funds were used to provide single-parent families with cash assistance. But when President Bill Clinton reformed welfare in 1996, replacing the old model with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), he transformed the program into a block grant that gives states considerable leeway in deciding how to distribute the money. As a result, states have come up with rather creative ways to spend TANF dollars. Arizona has used welfare money to pay for abstinence-only sex education. Pennsylvania diverted TANF funds to anti-abortion crisis-pregnancy centers. Maine used the money to support a Christian summer camp. Nationwide, for every dollar budgeted for TANF in 2020, poor families directly received just 22 cents.

We’ve approached the poverty question by pointing to poor people themselves, when we should have been focusing on exploitation.

A fair amount of government aid earmarked for the poor never reaches them. But this does not fully solve the puzzle of why poverty has been so stubbornly persistent, because many of the country’s largest social-welfare programs distribute funds directly to people. Roughly 85 percent of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program budget is dedicated to funding food stamps themselves, and almost 93 percent of Medicaid dollars flow directly to beneficiaries.

There are, it would seem, deeper structural forces at play, ones that have to do with the way the American poor are routinely taken advantage of. The primary reason for our stalled progress on poverty reduction has to do with the fact that we have not confronted the unrelenting exploitation of the poor in the labor, housing and financial markets.

As a theory of poverty, “exploitation” elicits a muddled response, causing us to think of course and but, no in the same instant. The word carries a moral charge, but social scientists have a fairly coolheaded way to measure exploitation: When we are underpaid relative to the value of what we produce, we experience labor exploitation; when we are overcharged relative to the value of something we purchase, we experience consumer exploitation. For example, if a family paid $1,000 a month to rent an apartment with a market value of $20,000, that family would experience a higher level of renter exploitation than a family who paid the same amount for an apartment with a market valuation of $100,000. When we don’t own property or can’t access credit, we become dependent on people who do and can, which in turn invites exploitation, because a bad deal for you is a good deal for me.

Our vulnerability to exploitation grows as our liberty shrinks. Because labor laws often fail to protect undocumented workers in practice, more than a third are paid below minimum wage, and nearly 85 percent are not paid overtime. Many of us who are U.S. citizens, or who crossed borders through official checkpoints, would not work for these wages. We don’t have to. If they migrate here as adults, those undocumented workers choose the terms of their arrangement. But just because desperate people accept and even seek out exploitative conditions doesn’t make those conditions any less exploitative. Sometimes exploitation is simply the best bad option.

Consider how many employers now get one over on American workers. The United States offers some of the lowest wages in the industrialized world. A larger share of workers in the United States make “low pay” — earning less than two-thirds of median wages — than in any other country belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. According to the group, nearly 23 percent of American workers labor in low-paying jobs, compared with roughly 17 percent in Britain, 11 percent in Japan and 5 percent in Italy. Poverty wages have swollen the ranks of the American working poor, most of whom are 35 or older.

One popular theory for the loss of good jobs is deindustrialization, which caused the shuttering of factories and the hollowing out of communities that had sprung up around them. Such a passive word, “deindustrialization” — leaving the impression that it just happened somehow, as if the country got deindustrialization the way a forest gets infested by bark beetles. But economic forces framed as inexorable, like deindustrialization and the acceleration of global trade, are often helped along by policy decisions like the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, which made it easier for companies to move their factories to Mexico and contributed to the loss of hundreds of thousands of American jobs. The world has changed, but it has changed for other economies as well. Yet Belgium and Canada and many other countries haven’t experienced the kind of wage stagnation and surge in income inequality that the United States has.

Those countries managed to keep their unions. We didn’t. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, nearly a third of all U.S. workers carried union cards. These were the days of the United Automobile Workers, led by Walter Reuther, once savagely beaten by Ford’s brass-knuckle boys, and of the mighty American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations that together represented around 15 million workers, more than the population of California at the time.

In their heyday, unions put up a fight. In 1970 alone, 2.4 million union members participated in work stoppages, wildcat strikes and tense standoffs with company heads. The labor movement fought for better pay and safer working conditions and supported antipoverty policies. Their efforts paid off for both unionized and nonunionized workers, as companies like Eastman Kodak were compelled to provide generous compensation and benefits to their workers to prevent them from organizing. By one estimate, the wages of nonunionized men without a college degree would be 8 percent higher today if union strength remained what it was in the late 1970s, a time when worker pay climbed, chief-executive compensation was reined in and the country experienced the most economically equitable period in modern history.

It is important to note that Old Labor was often a white man’s refuge. In the 1930s, many unions outwardly discriminated against Black workers or segregated them into Jim Crow local chapters. In the 1960s, unions like the Brotherhood of Railway and Steamship Clerks and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America enforced segregation within their ranks. Unions harmed themselves through their self-defeating racism and were further weakened by a changing economy. But organized labor was also attacked by political adversaries. As unions flagged, business interests sensed an opportunity. Corporate lobbyists made deep inroads in both political parties, beginning a public-relations campaign that pressured policymakers to roll back worker protections.

A national litmus test arrived in 1981, when 13,000 unionized air traffic controllers left their posts after contract negotiations with the Federal Aviation Administration broke down. When the workers refused to return, Reagan fired all of them. The public’s response was muted, and corporate America learned that it could crush unions with minimal blowback. And so it went, in one industry after another.

Today almost all private-sector employees (94 percent) are without a union, though roughly half of nonunion workers say they would organize if given the chance. They rarely are. Employers have at their disposal an arsenal of tactics designed to prevent collective bargaining, from hiring union-busting firms to telling employees that they could lose their jobs if they vote yes. Those strategies are legal, but companies also make illegal moves to block unions, like disciplining workers for trying to organize or threatening to close facilities. In 2016 and 2017, the National Labor Relations Board charged 42 percent of employers with violating federal law during union campaigns. In nearly a third of cases, this involved illegally firing workers for organizing.

Corporate lobbyists told us that organized labor was a drag on the economy — that once the companies had cleared out all these fusty, lumbering unions, the economy would rev up, raising everyone’s fortunes. But that didn’t come to pass. The negative effects of unions have been wildly overstated, and there is now evidence that unions play a role in increasing company productivity, for example by reducing turnover. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics measures productivity as how efficiently companies turn inputs (like materials and labor) into outputs (like goods and services). Historically, productivity, wages and profits rise and fall in lock step. But the American economy is less productive today than it was in the post-World War II period, when unions were at peak strength. The economies of other rich countries have slowed as well, including those with more highly unionized work forces, but it is clear that diluting labor power in America did not unleash economic growth or deliver prosperity to more people. “We were promised economic dynamism in exchange for inequality,” Eric Posner and Glen Weyl write in their book “Radical Markets.” “We got the inequality, but dynamism is actually declining.”

As workers lost power, their jobs got worse. For several decades after World War II, ordinary workers’ inflation-adjusted wages (known as “real wages”) increased by 2 percent each year. But since 1979, real wages have grown by only 0.3 percent a year. Astonishingly, workers with a high school diploma made 2.7 percent less in 2017 than they would have in 1979, adjusting for inflation. Workers without a diploma made nearly 10 percent less.

Lousy, underpaid work is not an indispensable, if regrettable, byproduct of capitalism, as some business defenders claim today. (This notion would have scandalized capitalism’s earliest defenders. John Stuart Mill, arch advocate of free people and free markets, once said that if widespread scarcity was a hallmark of capitalism, he would become a communist.) But capitalism is inherently about owners trying to give as little, and workers trying to get as much, as possible. With unions largely out of the picture, corporations have chipped away at the conventional midcentury work arrangement, which involved steady employment, opportunities for advancement and raises and decent pay with some benefits.

As the sociologist Gerald Davis has put it: Our grandparents had careers. Our parents had jobs. We complete tasks. Or at least that has been the story of the American working class and working poor.

Poor Americans aren’t just exploited in the labor market. They face consumer exploitation in the housing and financial markets as well.

There is a long history of slum exploitation in America. Money made slums because slums made money. Rent has more than doubled over the past two decades, rising much faster than renters’ incomes. Median rent rose from $483 in 2000 to $1,216 in 2021. Why have rents shot up so fast? Experts tend to offer the same rote answers to this question. There’s not enough housing supply, they say, and too much demand. Landlords must charge more just to earn a decent rate of return. Must they? How do we know?

We need more housing; no one can deny that. But rents have jumped even in cities with plenty of apartments to go around. At the end of 2021, almost 19 percent of rental units in Birmingham, Ala., sat vacant, as did 12 percent of those in Syracuse, N.Y. Yet rent in those areas increased by roughly 14 percent and 8 percent, respectively, over the previous two years. National data also show that rental revenues have far outpaced property owners’ expenses in recent years, especially for multifamily properties in poor neighborhoods. Rising rents are not simply a reflection of rising operating costs. There’s another dynamic at work, one that has to do with the fact that poor people — and particularly poor Black families — don’t have much choice when it comes to where they can live. Because of that, landlords can overcharge them, and they do.

A study I published with Nathan Wilmers found that after accounting for all costs, landlords operating in poor neighborhoods typically take in profits that are double those of landlords operating in affluent communities. If down-market landlords make more, it’s because their regular expenses (especially their mortgages and property-tax bills) are considerably lower than those in upscale neighborhoods. But in many cities with average or below-average housing costs — think Buffalo, not Boston — rents in the poorest neighborhoods are not drastically lower than rents in the middle-class sections of town. From 2015 to 2019, median monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the Indianapolis metropolitan area was $991; it was $816 in neighborhoods with poverty rates above 40 percent, just around 17 percent less. Rents are lower in extremely poor neighborhoods, but not by as much as you would think.

Yet where else can poor families live? They are shut out of homeownership because banks are disinclined to issue small-dollar mortgages, and they are also shut out of public housing, which now has waiting lists that stretch on for years and even decades. Struggling families looking for a safe, affordable place to live in America usually have but one choice: to rent from private landlords and fork over at least half their income to rent and utilities. If millions of poor renters accept this state of affairs, it’s not because they can’t afford better alternatives; it’s because they often aren’t offered any.

You can read injunctions against usury in the Vedic texts of ancient India, in the sutras of Buddhism and in the Torah. Aristotle and Aquinas both rebuked it. Dante sent moneylenders to the seventh circle of hell. None of these efforts did much to stem the practice, but they do reveal that the unprincipled act of trapping the poor in a cycle of debt has existed at least as long as the written word. It might be the oldest form of exploitation after slavery. Many writers have depicted America’s poor as unseen, shadowed and forgotten people: as “other” or “invisible.” But markets have never failed to notice the poor, and this has been particularly true of the market for money itself.

The deregulation of the banking system in the 1980s heightened competition among banks. Many responded by raising fees and requiring customers to carry minimum balances. In 1977, over a third of banks offered accounts with no service charge. By the early 1990s, only 5 percent did. Big banks grew bigger as community banks shuttered, and in 2021, the largest banks in America charged customers almost $11 billion in overdraft fees. Previous research showed that just 9 percent of account holders paid 84 percent of these fees. Who were the unlucky 9 percent? Customers who carried an average balance of less than $350. The poor were made to pay for their poverty.

In 2021, the average fee for overdrawing your account was $33.58. Because banks often issue multiple charges a day, it’s not uncommon to overdraw your account by $20 and end up paying $200 for it. Banks could (and do) deny accounts to people who have a history of overextending their money, but those customers also provide a steady revenue stream for some of the most powerful financial institutions in the world.

Every year: almost $11 billion in overdraft fees, $1.6 billion in check-cashing fees and up to $8.2 billion in payday-loan fees.

According to the F.D.I.C., one in 19 U.S. households had no bank account in 2019, amounting to more than seven million families. Compared with white families, Black and Hispanic families were nearly five times as likely to lack a bank account. Where there is exclusion, there is exploitation. Unbanked Americans have created a market, and thousands of check-cashing outlets now serve that market. Check-cashing stores generally charge from 1 to 10 percent of the total, depending on the type of check. That means that a worker who is paid $10 an hour and takes a $1,000 check to a check-cashing outlet will pay $10 to $100 just to receive the money he has earned, effectively losing one to 10 hours of work. (For many, this is preferable to the less-predictable exploitation by traditional banks, with their automatic overdraft fees. It’s the devil you know.) In 2020, Americans spent $1.6 billion just to cash checks. If the poor had a costless way to access their own money, over a billion dollars would have remained in their pockets during the pandemic-induced recession.

Poverty can mean missed payments, which can ruin your credit. But just as troublesome as bad credit is having no credit score at all, which is the case for 26 million adults in the United States. Another 19 million possess a credit history too thin or outdated to be scored. Having no credit (or bad credit) can prevent you from securing an apartment, buying insurance and even landing a job, as employers are increasingly relying on credit checks during the hiring process. And when the inevitable happens — when you lose hours at work or when the car refuses to start — the payday-loan industry steps in.

For most of American history, regulators prohibited lending institutions from charging exorbitant interest on loans. Because of these limits, banks kept interest rates between 6 and 12 percent and didn’t do much business with the poor, who in a pinch took their valuables to the pawnbroker or the loan shark. But the deregulation of the banking sector in the 1980s ushered the money changers back into the temple by removing strict usury limits. Interest rates soon reached 300 percent, then 500 percent, then 700 percent. Suddenly, some people were very interested in starting businesses that lent to the poor. In recent years, 17 states have brought back strong usury limits, capping interest rates and effectively prohibiting payday lending. But the trade thrives in most places. The annual percentage rate for a two-week $300 loan can reach 460 percent in California, 516 percent in Wisconsin and 664 percent in Texas.

Roughly a third of all payday loans are now issued online, and almost half of borrowers who have taken out online loans have had lenders overdraw their bank accounts. The average borrower stays indebted for five months, paying $520 in fees to borrow $375. Keeping people indebted is, of course, the ideal outcome for the payday lender. It’s how they turn a $15 profit into a $150 one. Payday lenders do not charge high fees because lending to the poor is risky — even after multiple extensions, most borrowers pay up. Lenders extort because they can.

Every year: almost $11 billion in overdraft fees, $1.6 billion in check-cashing fees and up to $8.2 billion in payday-loan fees. That’s more than $55 million in fees collected predominantly from low-income Americans each day — not even counting the annual revenue collected by pawnshops and title loan services and rent-to-own schemes. When James Baldwin remarked in 1961 how “extremely expensive it is to be poor,” he couldn’t have imagined these receipts.

“Predatory inclusion” is what the historian Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor calls it in her book “Race for Profit,” describing the longstanding American tradition of incorporating marginalized people into housing and financial schemes through bad deals when they are denied good ones. The exclusion of poor people from traditional banking and credit systems has forced them to find alternative ways to cash checks and secure loans, which has led to a normalization of their exploitation. This is all perfectly legal, after all, and subsidized by the nation’s richest commercial banks. The fringe banking sector would not exist without lines of credit extended by the conventional one. Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase bankroll payday lenders like Advance America and Cash America. Everybody gets a cut.

Poverty isn’t simply the condition of not having enough money. It’s the condition of not having enough choice and being taken advantage of because of that. When we ignore the role that exploitation plays in trapping people in poverty, we end up designing policy that is weak at best and ineffective at worst. For example, when legislation lifts incomes at the bottom without addressing the housing crisis, those gains are often realized instead by landlords, not wholly by the families the legislation was intended to help. A 2019 study conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found that when states raised minimum wages, families initially found it easier to pay rent. But landlords quickly responded to the wage bumps by increasing rents, which diluted the effect of the policy. This happened after the pandemic rescue packages, too: When wages began to rise in 2021 after worker shortages, rents rose as well, and soon people found themselves back where they started or worse.

Antipoverty programs work. Each year, millions of families are spared the indignities and hardships of severe deprivation because of these government investments. But our current antipoverty programs cannot abolish poverty by themselves. The Johnson administration started the War on Poverty and the Great Society in 1964. These initiatives constituted a bundle of domestic programs that included the Food Stamp Act, which made food aid permanent; the Economic Opportunity Act, which created Job Corps and Head Start; and the Social Security Amendments of 1965, which founded Medicare and Medicaid and expanded Social Security benefits. Nearly 200 pieces of legislation were signed into law in President Lyndon B. Johnson’s first five years in office, a breathtaking level of activity. And the result? Ten years after the first of these programs were rolled out in 1964, the share of Americans living in poverty was half what it was in 1960.

But the War on Poverty and the Great Society were started during a time when organized labor was strong, incomes were climbing, rents were modest and the fringe banking industry as we know it today didn’t exist. Today multiple forms of exploitation have turned antipoverty programs into something like dialysis, a treatment designed to make poverty less lethal, not to make it disappear.

This means we don’t just need deeper antipoverty investments. We need different ones, policies that refuse to partner with poverty, policies that threaten its very survival. We need to ensure that aid directed at poor people stays in their pockets, instead of being captured by companies whose low wages are subsidized by government benefits, or by landlords who raise the rents as their tenants’ wages rise, or by banks and payday-loan outlets who issue exorbitant fines and fees. Unless we confront the many forms of exploitation that poor families face, we risk increasing government spending only to experience another 50 years of sclerosis in the fight against poverty.

The best way to address labor exploitation is to empower workers. A renewed contract with American workers should make organizing easy. As things currently stand, unionizing a workplace is incredibly difficult. Under current labor law, workers who want to organize must do so one Amazon warehouse or one Starbucks location at a time. We have little chance of empowering the nation’s warehouse workers and baristas this way. This is why many new labor movements are trying to organize entire sectors. The Fight for $15 campaign, led by the Service Employees International Union, doesn’t focus on a single franchise (a specific McDonald’s store) or even a single company (McDonald’s) but brings together workers from several fast-food chains. It’s a new kind of labor power, and one that could be expanded: If enough workers in a specific economic sector — retail, hotel services, nursing — voted for the measure, the secretary of labor could establish a bargaining panel made up of representatives elected by the workers. The panel could negotiate with companies to secure the best terms for workers across the industry. This is a way to organize all Amazon warehouses and all Starbucks locations in a single go.

Sectoral bargaining, as it’s called, would affect tens of millions of Americans who have never benefited from a union of their own, just as it has improved the lives of workers in Europe and Latin America. The idea has been criticized by members of the business community, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has raised concerns about the inflexibility and even the constitutionality of sectoral bargaining, as well as by labor advocates, who fear that industrywide policies could nullify gains that existing unions have made or could be achieved only if workers make other sacrifices. Proponents of the idea counter that sectoral bargaining could even the playing field, not only between workers and bosses, but also between companies in the same sector that would no longer be locked into a race to the bottom, with an incentive to shortchange their work force to gain a competitive edge. Instead, the companies would be forced to compete over the quality of the goods and services they offer. Maybe we would finally reap the benefits of all that economic productivity we were promised.

We must also expand the housing options for low-income families. There isn’t a single right way to do this, but there is clearly a wrong way: the way we’re doing it now. One straightforward approach is to strengthen our commitment to the housing programs we already have. Public housing provides affordable homes to millions of Americans, but it’s drastically underfunded relative to the need. When the wealthy township of Cherry Hill, N.J., opened applications for 29 affordable apartments in 2021, 9,309 people applied. The sky-high demand should tell us something, though: that affordable housing is a life changer, and families are desperate for it.

We could also pave the way for more Americans to become homeowners, an initiative that could benefit poor, working-class and middle-class families alike — as well as scores of young people. Banks generally avoid issuing small-dollar mortgages, not because they’re riskier — these mortgages have the same delinquency rates as larger mortgages — but because they’re less profitable. Over the life of a mortgage, interest on $1 million brings in a lot more money than interest on $75,000. This is where the federal government could step in, providing extra financing to build on-ramps to first-time homeownership. In fact, it already does so in rural America through the 502 Direct Loan Program, which has moved more than two million families into their own homes. These loans, fully guaranteed and serviced by the Department of Agriculture, come with low interest rates and, for very poor families, cover the entire cost of the mortgage, nullifying the need for a down payment. Last year, the average 502 Direct Loan was for $222,300 but cost the government only $10,370 per loan, chump change for such a durable intervention. Expanding a program like this into urban communities would provide even more low- and moderate-income families with homes of their own.

We should also ensure fair access to capital. Banks should stop robbing the poor and near-poor of billions of dollars each year, immediately ending exorbitant overdraft fees. As the legal scholar Mehrsa Baradaran has pointed out, when someone overdraws an account, banks could simply freeze the transaction or could clear a check with insufficient funds, providing customers a kind of short-term loan with a low interest rate of, say, 1 percent a day.

States should rein in payday-lending institutions and insist that lenders make it clear to potential borrowers what a loan is ultimately likely to cost them. Just as fast-food restaurants must now publish calorie counts next to their burgers and shakes, payday-loan stores should publish the average overall cost of different loans. When Texas adopted disclosure rules, residents took out considerably fewer bad loans. If Texas can do this, why not California or Wisconsin? Yet to stop financial exploitation, we need to expand, not limit, low-income Americans’ access to credit. Some have suggested that the government get involved by having the U.S. Postal Service or the Federal Reserve issue small-dollar loans. Others have argued that we should revise government regulations to entice commercial banks to pitch in. Whatever our approach, solutions should offer low-income Americans more choice, a way to end their reliance on predatory lending institutions that can get away with robbery because they are the only option available.

In Tommy Orange’s novel, “There There,” a man trying to describe the problem of suicides on Native American reservations says: “Kids are jumping out the windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths. And we think the problem is that they’re jumping.” The poverty debate has suffered from a similar kind of myopia. For the past half-century, we’ve approached the poverty question by pointing to poor people themselves — posing questions about their work ethic, say, or their welfare benefits — when we should have been focusing on the fire. The question that should serve as a looping incantation, the one we should ask every time we drive past a tent encampment, those tarped American slums smelling of asphalt and bodies, or every time we see someone asleep on the bus, slumped over in work clothes, is simply: Who benefits? Not: Why don’t you find a better job? Or: Why don’t you move? Or: Why don’t you stop taking out payday loans? But: Who is feeding off this?

Those who have amassed the most power and capital bear the most responsibility for America’s vast poverty: political elites who have utterly failed low-income Americans over the past half-century; corporate bosses who have spent and schemed to prioritize profits over families; lobbyists blocking the will of the American people with their self-serving interests; property owners who have exiled the poor from entire cities and fueled the affordable-housing crisis. Acknowledging this is both crucial and deliciously absolving; it directs our attention upward and distracts us from all the ways (many unintentional) that we — we the secure, the insured, the housed, the college-educated, the protected, the lucky — also contribute to the problem.

Corporations benefit from worker exploitation, sure, but so do consumers, who buy the cheap goods and services the working poor produce, and so do those of us directly or indirectly invested in the stock market. Landlords are not the only ones who benefit from housing exploitation; many homeowners do, too, their property values propped up by the collective effort to make housing scarce and expensive. The banking and payday-lending industries profit from the financial exploitation of the poor, but so do those of us with free checking accounts, as those accounts are subsidized by billions of dollars in overdraft fees.

Living our daily lives in ways that express solidarity with the poor could mean we pay more; anti-exploitative investing could dampen our stock portfolios. By acknowledging those costs, we acknowledge our complicity. Unwinding ourselves from our neighbors’ deprivation and refusing to live as enemies of the poor will require us to pay a price. It’s the price of our restored humanity and renewed country.

Matthew Desmond is a professor of sociology at Princeton University and a contributing writer for the magazine. His latest book, “Poverty, by America,” from which this article is adapted, is being published on March 21 by Crown.

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the legal protections for undocumented workers. They are afforded rights under U.S. labor laws, though in practice those laws often fail to protect them.

An earlier version of this article implied an incorrect date for a statistic about overdraft fees. The research was conducted between 2005 and 2012, not in 2021.

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Why even brilliant scholars misunderstand poverty in America

Housing expert Matthew Desmond argues poverty has stagnated in America, but misses something big.

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Matthew Desmond, the acclaimed Princeton sociologist and author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City , thinks that poverty has barely improved in the United States over the past 50 years — and he has a theory why. Laid out in a long essay for the New York Times Magazine that is adapted from his forthcoming book Poverty, by America , Desmond’s theory implicates “exploitation” in the broadest sense, from a decline in unions and worker power to a proliferation of bank fees and predatory landlord practices, all of which combine to keep the American underclass down.

Desmond, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for Evicted , is an original and nuanced thinker and I cannot do his 6,000-word argument justice in a short article. But I do know a little bit about how we measure poverty, and I want to back up briefly and interrogate Desmond’s fundamental premise: Has poverty in America persisted ? Is it true that in recent decades, as Desmond writes, “On the problem of poverty ... there has been no real improvement — just a long stasis”? Is it true, as he posits, that the large increase in government spending on antipoverty programs in recent decades (a 130 percent increase from 1980 to 2018, by his numbers) hasn’t made a dent in poverty?

There is widespread disagreement, including among experts, about how to define “poverty.” But contrary to Desmond’s claim that the stagnation “cannot be chalked up to how the poor are counted,” I would insist the answer to whether poverty has fallen or stagnated in America depends entirely on how the poor are counted.

One set of approaches gives a clear answer: Poverty has plummeted dramatically since the 1960s due to a huge increase in government spending on programs that help lower-income people . Another set of approaches suggests that poverty has, as Desmond insists, stagnated (and would have risen absent that government spending ).

Both these approaches have useful, distinct stories to tell us about poverty in America. One point they agree on, though, is that safety net programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, sometimes known as food stamps), Medicaid, Social Security, and the earned income tax credit have played an important role in reducing poverty. That is, Desmond’s core premise, that expanding safety net programs haven’t slashed poverty, is wrong. They have. You just need to measure poverty carefully.

How to measure poverty

To come up with a poverty measure, one generally needs two things: a threshold at which a household becomes “poor” and a definition of income. For instance, in 2023, a family of four is defined by the government as officially in poverty in the US if they earn $30,000 or less. That’s the Official Poverty Measure’s threshold, and weirdly it’s the same for 48 states and DC, but higher in Alaska and Hawaii, supposedly due to their higher cost of living.

But what does it mean to earn $30,000 or less? Should we just count cash from a job? What about pensions and retirement accounts? What about Social Security, which is kind of like a pension? What about resources like SNAP that aren’t money but can be spent in some ways like money? What about health insurance?

These aren’t simple questions to answer, and scholars like the late, great Rebecca Blank devoted much of their careers to trying to answer them. But I think it’s fair to say there’s a broad consensus among researchers that income should be defined very broadly. It should at the very least include things like tax refunds and SNAP that are close to cash, and simpler to include than benefits like health insurance.

That’s why there’s also near-unanimous consensus among poverty researchers that the official poverty measure (OPM) in the United States is a disaster . I have written about poverty policy for over a decade and have never heard even one expert argue it is well-designed. I was frankly a little shocked to see Desmond cite it without qualification in his article.

Its biggest flaw is that it uses a restrictive and incoherent definition of income. Some government benefits, like Social Security, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), count. But others, like tax credits, SNAP, and health care, don’t count at all. So many programs designed to cut poverty, like SNAP or Medicaid or the earned income tax credit, therefore by definition cannot reduce the official poverty rate because they do not count as income.

The Census Bureau now publishes a supplemental poverty measure (SPM), which uses a much more comprehensive definition of income that includes the social programs the OPM excludes. It also varies thresholds regionally to account for different costs of living, rather than simply breaking off Alaska and Hawaii. That’s a clear improvement.

Some experts, notably economists Bruce D. Meyer and James X. Sullivan , argue that looking for a definition of income is itself a mistake: Poverty is most usefully defined in terms of consumption, the resources people actually buy and consume. They argue this makes conceiving of benefits like Medicaid easier. Getting Medicaid is hard to think of as “income,” but enrollees are definitely “consuming” things like doctor’s visits, prescription drugs, etc, that they would struggle to obtain without those benefits.

But overall, disputes among poverty experts about how to define income or consumption or “resources” tend, in my experience, to be muted compared to disputes over where to draw the thresholds: where to set the poverty line and how to adjust it over time.

The simplest way to approach this is to do what the official poverty measure does: Take a set amount of money and adjust it for inflation over time. Specifically, the poverty rate was devised in 1963 by Mollie Orshansky , an economist at the Social Security Administration, based on the US Department of Agriculture’s 1961 estimate, which itself was based on 1955 data, of how much money a family of four would need for food, if they were really pinching pennies. Orshansky tripled this estimate, since families of three more typically spent a third of their income on food at the time. (Americans now spend only about 10 percent of income on food, though the subset of families that Orshansky was looking at may spend more.)

That was the poverty line, and it has not changed since, with the exception of annual adjustments according to the Consumer Price Index.

That is, of course, an incredibly arbitrary threshold to draw, and it’s almost a cliché at this point to note how dumb it is. There’s an episode of The West Wing with a subplot about how old and dumb and outdated the poverty line is, and that episode is itself now over 21 years old.

But experts are split on what a better line to draw would be.

Absolute versus relative poverty

The official poverty measure is what’s sometimes known as an “absolute” poverty measure. Measures like this generally only adjust their thresholds for inflation. Many are based on less arbitrary numbers than “what people spent on food in 1955,” and many use different measurements of inflation, since a lot of economists think the Consumer Price Index overstates price increases compared to the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) or chained CPI measures. But they fundamentally have a lot in common with the OPM’s approach: They set a dollar threshold for who is and isn’t poor and stick to it.

Absolute poverty measures are crystal clear about what has happened to poverty since the 1960s: It plummeted. The below chart shows three different absolute measures, all of which use expansive income definitions, unlike the official rate. All three have fallen dramatically.

(Many thanks to economist Kevin Corinth for passing along this series from his working paper with Richard Burkhauser, James Elwell, and Jeff Larrimore.)

The primary case for absolute measures like these is that they’re easy to interpret. Because the thresholds only change due to inflation, changes in the poverty rate only happen because people near the bottom get richer or poorer. If poverty falls, it’s because some low-income people gained more money or resources. If it increases, it’s because some low-income people lost out. Insofar as those kinds of material changes at the bottom are the main thing one cares about, absolute measures can be helpful. As a group of Columbia researchers argued in 2016 , absolute measures are “more useful for establishing how families’ resources have changed against a fixed benchmark.”

Applied to the US, the takeaway is that many fewer people are living on a very small amount of money than was the case in the 1960s.

But many poverty scholars prefer to use what are called “relative” measures. Such measures set the threshold as a percentage of the country in question’s median income (usually 50 or 60 percent). Most rich countries other than the US define poverty in this way. The European Union, for instance, uses what it calls an “at risk of poverty” rate , defined as the share of residents in a country living on less than 60 percent of the median disposable income. The United Kingdom uses a “households below average income” (HBAI) statistic, with the main threshold set to 60 percent of median income.

The case for relative measures is that poverty is socially defined, and “being in poverty” is usually thought of as people not being able to exist with the level of comfort that is normal in the society in which they live. A common definition, from the British scholar Peter Townsend , posits that poverty is “the absence or inadequacy of those diets, amenities, standards, services and activities which are common or customary in society.” Commonness or customariness are relative attributes, not absolute ones. Some, like sociologist David Brady, have also argued for relative measures on the grounds that they correlate better with self-reported mental and physical health and well-being .

Looked at in relative terms, poverty hasn’t fallen in the US in recent decades. It’s stagnated:

Advocates of absolute measures counter that relative poverty measures inequality rather than actual deprivation. Bruce Meyer, for instance, cites the experience of Ireland in the 2000s , which experienced “real growth in incomes throughout the distribution including the bottom. However, because the middle grew a bit faster than the bottom, a relative poverty measure shows an increase in poverty. Thus, we have a situation of nearly everyone being better off, but poverty nonetheless rising.” The reverse can happen in recessions, where if median incomes fall faster than incomes at the bottom, poverty can fall, even though everyone’s worse off.

Some measures, sometimes called “quasi-relative” or “semi-relative,” split the difference between the two approaches. They don’t merely vary with inflation, but they’re not a simple percentage of average incomes, either. The US supplemental poverty measure is a good example: It’s based on the 33rd percentile of spending on “food, clothing, shelter, and utilities” (FCSU). That is, researchers rank households by the amount they spend on those categories, find the point such that a third of households are below it and two-thirds are above, and use that as the basis for the SPM line. Because spending on these goods varies year to year, the thresholds change year to year, and not just based on inflation, but the change tends to be minimal compared to the changes in pure relative measures.

Government taxing and spending has become more important in fighting poverty

So … who’s right? The boring but correct answer is that these measures capture different things and each tells us something interesting. The fall in absolute poverty tells us that fewer people are living on very low cash incomes than were in, say, 1980. One estimate suggests that the fall in absolute poverty since 1967 means that 55 million fewer people lived in poverty in 2020 than would have if absolute poverty had stagnated.

The stagnation in relative incomes tells us that income growth at the bottom isn’t faster than growth at the middle and that there’s still a substantial share of America living on substantially below-average incomes — with 23.1 percent of Americans living in poverty under the definition used by the EU and UK (compared to 15.5 percent in the UK and 16.5 percent in the EU).

I do, however, want to highlight a point where absolute and relative poverty measures align: Government spending on social programs plays an important role in reducing poverty, and such spending does more to fight poverty now than it did in the recent past.

One highly cited absolute poverty measure is the “anchored” supplemental poverty measure , produced by Columbia researchers Christopher Wimer, Liana Fox, Irwin Garfinkel, Neeraj Kaushal, and Jane Waldfogel. This measure simply uses the Supplemental Poverty Measure thresholds from 2012 and extends them back to 1967.

This measure shows a substantial decline in poverty — but more importantly, it shows that government transfer programs are the only reason poverty has substantially declined. Before taxes and transfers, the poverty rate by this metric was 26.4 percent in 1967 and 22.5 percent in 2019. In the pandemic year of 2020, it shot up to 24.9 percent, barely different from 53 years previous. But after taxes and transfers, poverty fell from 25 percent in 1967 to 11.2 percent in 2019 — and to 8.4 percent amid the flood of stimulus money in 2020. The big story here is that government programs are doing much more than they did in the 1960s or 1980s to slash poverty.

One sees the same pattern in relative poverty. A 2019 paper by researchers Koen Caminada, Jinxian Wang, Kees Goudswaard, and Chen Wang for LIS, an international research center for income and poverty issues, estimates that in 1985, taxes and transfers in the US reduced relative poverty by 6.2 points. In 2013, the reduction was 9.7 points. Without government intervention, relative poverty would have increased from 1985 to 2013; instead, it merely stagnated.

Desmond, in his essay, spends some time marveling that “federal investments in means-tested programs increased by 130 percent from 1980 to 2018,” a fact he finds hard to square with the official poverty rate remaining flat. Surely that spending should have reduced poverty!

The answer here is simple: It did reduce poverty. The escalation of government investment made a difference, no matter what reputable poverty data you look at, whether absolute or relative. The only data series where it doesn’t make a difference is the official poverty measure, which literally does not consider most of this spending and acts like it does not exist.

The points Desmond makes about forces of exploitation in the markets poor people interact with — from payday lenders to bosses who can take advantage of their monopoly power and weakened unions to set low wages to the landlords he profiled in his breakout book — are well-taken. These could very well help explain why poverty would have stagnated or risen without government intervention, and addressing them might prove effective at fighting poverty. But there’s no need to couple this argument with claims that government spending has done nothing to reduce poverty. It has done a tremendous amount.

Much of the confusion in Desmond’s piece is not his fault, exactly. It’s the fault of the US government and its official poverty measure. Congress and the Department of Health and Human Services urgently need to abolish the OPM. It’s a bad number that tells a misleading story about poverty in America, and acting to replace it would do a lot of good.

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The Price Of Poverty: What It Means To Be Poor In America

Residents receive food at the St. Helena Pantry in the Bronx in New York City. Spencer Platt/Getty Images hide caption

Residents receive food at the St. Helena Pantry in the Bronx in New York City.

In 2020, more than 37 million Americans lived in poverty according to new data from the U.S Census Bureau. That's 3.3 million more than in 2019.

But this number doesn't include those who are above the poverty line and struggling to make a living.

According to the Poor People's Campaign, once low-income families are accounted for, that number is closer to 140 million Americans.

What does it actually mean to be poor? How do people fall below the poverty line? And why is it so hard to get above it? We carve out time to talk about poverty in America in our series "The Price of Poverty."

The University of Michigan's Luke Shaefer , U.S. Census Bureau's Liana Fox , and Washington State University's Jennifer Sherman join us for the first part of our series.

Like what you hear? Find more of our programs online .

What Happened to Poverty in America in 2021

Volunteers fill boxes at the Food Bank for the Heartland distribution warehouse in Omaha, Nebraska, on Dec. 8, 2021. FRONTLINE has tracked how poverty affects American families with children across several years and films. (Dan Brouillette/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

When it comes to tracking how poverty impacts American families, and especially children, estimates for 2021 reveal something noteworthy.

Pandemic-era benefits may have helped drive poverty in 2021 lower than in 2020, according to researchers at Columbia University’s Center on Poverty & Social Policy and at the nonprofit Urban Institute. By one measure, last year was already a notable low, with the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2020 supplemental poverty rate — which factors in families’ expenses, as well as government assistance like stimulus checks — falling to its lowest since the estimate was first published, in 2009.

FRONTLINE has been documenting how poverty impacts families — and especially children — for several years, including in the documentaries Poor Kids (2017) and Growing Up Poor in America (2020).

The Census Bureau’s annual poverty figures for 2021 won’t be available until well into next year. While researchers estimated that poverty declined in 2021, they cautioned that the trend could be temporary, with many pandemic-era benefits ending. So where does that leave American families now?

Did Pandemic-Era Policies Affect Poverty in 2021?

Zachary Parolin has been leading the Columbia researchers’ monthly estimates of U.S. poverty since the start of the pandemic. According to the team’s data, the poverty rate in December 2020 — when many pandemic-related benefits had expired — was 16.1% . But when some benefits were renewed or extended in January 2021, the monthly poverty estimate declined to 13.2% .

“In fact, throughout the entire year of 2021 , the poverty rate has been lower than that 16.1% that we saw in December 2020,” Parolin said. The Columbia team estimated that poverty in 2021 rose to a high of 14.3% in February and declined to 9.3% — its lowest level of the year — in March, when families received economic impact payments, as well as income tax and child tax credits.

“The last two years taken together have probably shown us more clearly than any time in recent history how much policy matters,” Megan Curran, a Columbia researcher said. The team’s research found that without the early pandemic aid provided by the March 2020 CARES Act, poverty rates could potentially have rivaled those during the Great Recession. She cited federal actions — economic impact payments (also known as stimulus checks), expanded unemployment insurance, increased food assistance and other measures — in averting a worst-case scenario.

The researchers also looked closely at the expanded child tax credit, put in place by Congress’ March 2021 American Rescue Plan. When the expanded credit went into effect in July, it raised benefits from $2,000 to $3,600 for children under 6 and to $3,000 for children ages 6 to 17. It reached families that didn’t earn enough income to owe taxes, and it was paid in monthly installments from July to December 2021, instead of all at once in 2022.

The Columbia researchers found that measure alone kept roughly 3.5 million children out of poverty in each month for which data is available.

“We haven’t seen these types of reductions in a long time,” Parolin said of the credit’s effect on childhood poverty, noting the persistently low poverty rates among children during the months the credit was available. (December 2021 is the last month eligible families will receive the payment, unless a version of the credit is renewed in the Build Back Better legislation currently facing hurdles in the Senate. With no Republican support, the legislation’s passage would rely on Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who in the past has expressed reservations that the expanded child tax credit has no  work requirement .)

Read more: How COVID Has Impacted Poverty in America

Researchers at the Urban Institute also examined the impacts of pandemic-era benefits and stimulus measures. Looking at 2021 as a whole, they projected government-assistance programs — both those that existed pre-COVID and those created in response to the pandemic — would reduce the 2021 poverty rate by 67% , compared to what it would have been with no government assistance, and would keep nearly 50 million Americans out of poverty over the course of the year.

“What we observed were some of the largest short-term reductions in poverty that we’ve seen,” said Ilham Dehry, a co-author of the Urban Institute report . Their projections showed stimulus checks having the largest antipoverty impact, keeping 12.4 million people from falling into poverty in 2021. That echoes the Census Bureau’s findings for 2020 , when stimulus checks kept 11.7 million people out of poverty.

The Urban Institute projected that benefits — both pre-COVID and pandemic-era — would reduce poverty among children by 81% in 2021, compared to without benefits. Their projections showed a lower poverty rate for children than for all adults and those over 65 — a seeming reversal of a trend over the last decade, when the poverty rate for children has been higher than for other age groups. Dehry said the 2021 reductions in child poverty “might reflect the targeted nature of some of the aid,” such as the expanded child tax credit and per-child stimulus payments for families.

Some economists have argued that extending the expanded child tax credit “will serve as a disincentive to work” and, with parents leaving the workforce, that it would blunt the poverty-reduction effects of the credit.

Gregory Acs, vice president for income and benefits policy at the Urban Institute, said extending the expanded child tax credit would allow researchers to learn more about how it shapes people’s behavior, including whether it leads adults to work less or to spend more time with their children.

“Reducing child poverty has the potential to have profound intergenerational benefits,” Acs said. “If kids are not poor, if households are not stressed by poverty, then they’re more likely to … do better in school, get more education and be on a better path forward as adults.”

What Happened to Food Hardship?

In December 2020, Joseph Llobrera, director of research on food assistance at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, described food hardship — or families not getting enough to eat — as “off the charts”: 18.3% among households with children, according to data he analyzed from the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture also showed food hardship increasing in 2020 for families with children, and for Black and Hispanic families, although the percent of food insecure households in 2020 remained the same as in 2019: 10.5%. Data from a survey sponsored by the USDA also showed that 2.3% more households reported using food pantries in 2020 as compared to a year earlier.

Read more: “I Don’t Want to Live Like This Forever”: A 14-Year-Old’s Story of “Hidden Homelessness” Amid the Coronavirus Pandemic

To counteract the pandemic’s impact, the federal government expanded food assistance in several ways. Families eligible for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) could receive supplemental emergency allotments . An EBT program launched in March 2020 allowed the families of kids who usually would get free or reduced-price lunches at school to receive temporary benefits to purchase food. SNAP benefits increased 15% from January through September 2021. Then a long-planned modernization of SNAP benefits kicked in in October, raising benefits 27% compared to without pandemic-era increases.

Llobrera found that overall food hardship, as measured by the Household Pulse Survey, dropped between December 2020 and January 2021 then dropped again in mid-March 2021 and once again in mid-July — the latter coinciding with the rollout of the expanded child tax credit. At the same time, Llobrera said food hardship among households without children stayed flat or worsened.

After dropping to a low of 9.5% during the summer of 2021, the percent of households with children who didn’t get enough to eat crept back up to 11.8% by October, the most recent month for which data was available .

While Llobrera is still trying to understand the full impact of these programs, he said, “Even with the data that we have, it’s shown … overall poverty rates, food insecurity rates, those would be so much higher, and hardship would have been so much worse, had those resources not been made available to households that were impacted by the pandemic.”

What’s Happening Now — and What’s Next?

In recent months, the U.S. has seen rising inflation, as well as consumer prices in November reaching their largest 12-month increase since 1982.

Unless the benefits people receive are adjusted for inflation, their “antipoverty effects are going to be eroded,” said Acs of the Urban Institute.

Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, director of Northwestern University’s Institute for Policy Research, has observed food-hardship rates creeping back up and said it could be partially attributed to rising food prices.

“Of course, low-income families have less slack in their budget. They spend a higher share of their total income on necessities,” she said. “So then, of course, when there are increases in prices of necessities, that harms them disproportionately.”

Read more: Catching Up With 2 of the Kids From ‘Poor Kids’

In addition, several of the pandemic-era measures that helped keep people out of poverty over the last two years were either finite (like the stimulus checks), have since expired (like expanded unemployment benefits and the 15% increase in SNAP benefits) or have no guarantee they will continue (like the expanded child tax credit ).

“We basically see the fortunes of families sort of rise and fall with the timeline of when policies are in place and when they expire,” Columbia’s Curran said. “All of these income supports have just been so critical to keeping families afloat.”

The Columbia researchers predicted that, unless the expanded child tax credit is renewed, signs of increasing child poverty could start to show up in January 2022.

Acs said several factors could impact poverty overall in 2022. If employment goes up, poverty could go down. Or the end of pandemic-era programs could mean higher poverty, and if inflation continues to rise, poverty could be higher still.

“The crisis made us put all these things in place that many people have been calling for for a long time,” Curran said. “But I think it also showed us that when they were in place, they really worked. And so, I think the lesson that policymakers can take away from this is that we have the tools to keep poverty much lower than it has been for the past half a century,” she said.

“It’s just actually a question of: Are we willing to make this commitment on a more permanent basis?”

Priyanka Boghani , Digital Editor , FRONTLINE

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Poverty in America: New Directions and Debates

In this section.

• Matthew Desmond

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Poverty Rates Have Increased Since the COVID-19 Pandemic

Giving compass' take:.

• Sherri Lawson Clark explains how poverty in America is measured and how it has increased since the pandemic.
• What role can you play in addressing poverty at scale?
• Read about childhood poverty and what can be done to help .

What is Giving Compass?

We connect donors to learning resources and ways to support community-led solutions. Learn more about us .

For the past 25 years, my research as a cultural anthropologist has taken me into the homes and neighborhoods of people living in poverty in cities and rural communities throughout the U.S.

To better understand their day-to-day lives, I also have spent time in grocery stores, churches, nightclubs, parks and health clinics.

I’ve asked countless questions, ranging from how many times they had moved to the types of social services they received.

But of all the answers, none has perplexed me more than the one I receive when I ask, “Are you poor?”

Not one has ever answered yes.

One mother was almost indignant. “My kids have food in their bellies, a roof over their heads, and clothes on their backs, so, no, I’m not poor,” she told me.

A decent standard of living

Who, then, decides who is poor in America?

The answer is the federal government, which has spent nearly the past 60 years trying to define and measure poverty and, ultimately, allocate money to provide families with a financial safety net.

Though many of the people I’ve interviewed over the years did not consider themselves poor, their incomes made them eligible to receive government subsidies such as cash assistance, Medicaid or public housing, thus placing them in categories the government considers poor.

Poverty in the U.S. is based on a person’s ability to purchase the things they need to achieve a certain standard of living. According to 2022 U.S. Census Bureau data – the most recent available – poverty for a family of four was an annual income of at or below US$29,960. For a single person, the poverty threshold was $14,891.

To put those numbers in perspective, the median U.S. household income in 2022 was $74,580 – more than two times the poverty threshold. About 38 million Americans – nearly 12% – live at or below the poverty line. And 16.1 of children under the age of 6 live in poverty.

Measuring US poverty

In the early 1960s, Mollie Orshansky , a government statistician, developed the official poverty measure that is still in use today.

In her earlier statistical work with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Orshansky had calculated that people spend roughly a third of their incomes on food. Known as the bread basket method, the income level used to define poverty was calculated based on the cost of feeding a family.

Since the 1960s, the rate of people living in poverty has held steady between 11% and 15%.

But the measurement has a few shortcomings.

Take the regional differences in costs for the same products. In early 2024, for instance, a loaf of bread in Los Angeles, California, was $4.73, while in Louisville, Kentucky, the same loaf was $2.46.

Another flaw is the definition of what constitutes a family of four members.

The costs of feeding a family of four can be vastly different for a single mother with three school-age children than a married couple with two infant children.

The politics of poverty

Starting in 2011, the second metric that the Census Bureau officials use is the supplemental poverty rate .

Unlike the official poverty rate, the supplemental rate takes into account various types of government aid such as food, housing and energy assistance, as well as tax credits and stimulus payments. The measurement also calculates regional differences in the cost of living, medical care and housing.

Though distinct, these two measurements are often used by politicians to score points over their political rivals.

Such was the case in September 2023 when the Census Bureau found that the supplemental rate had spiked from 7.8% in 2021 to 12.4% in 2022, the largest increase since 2010.

The same measurement for the share of children living in poverty also hit 12.4%, more than doubling from 5.2% in 2021.

When the numbers were released by the Census Bureau in September 2023, former President Donald Trump immediately attacked President Joe Biden and compared the decline in poverty during his presidency with an increase in poverty during Biden’s term.

But Trump left out key facts.

The supplemental rates did decline from 14% in 2016, before Trump took office in 2017, to 9.2% in his last full year as president in 2020 . But the drop was due in large part to coronavirus relief payments that were made available to qualifying people and families during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The relief payments also helped lower the number of people in poverty under the Biden administration.

But those COVID-19 era payments expired in 2021. Without that same aid – and help from Biden’s American Rescue Plan – the share of people considered poor went up in 2022 under Biden. The sharp increase that year came on the heels of the previous year when the percentage of people in poverty was at its lowest level on record.

Temporary relief?

Starting after the Great Depression, U.S. presidents have made reducing poverty a priority in their administrations. Most notably, Franklin D. Roosevelt had the New Deal and Lyndon Johnson had the Great Society .

But thus far during the 2024 presidential campaign, the issue of reducing poverty has been overshadowed by Trump’s legal troubles and Biden’s inability to force an end to the Israel-Hamas war.

In the world’s richest nation, more than 23 million people – a little more than 1 in 10 adults – live in households where there was not enough food to eat, according to the Census Bureau’s March 2024 Household Pulse Survey . And many of these people have jobs.

Despite trillions of U.S. dollars spent on lifting people out of poverty – $1.9 trillion in 2022 alone – it appears the federal government’s ability to provide a safety net for all those in need has fallen short.

As economist Bob Pfeiffer once said: “Our welfare system is designed to make lives more comfortable, not to solve poverty.”

Sherri Lawson Clark , Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Wake Forest University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article . The Conversation is a nonprofit news source dedicated to spreading ideas and expertise from academia into the public discourse.

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Poverty in America

This essay will address the issue of poverty in America, discussing its various dimensions and causes. It will explore factors contributing to poverty, including economic inequality, lack of education, and systemic issues. The piece will examine the impact of poverty on different demographics and regions, and the measures being taken to alleviate it, such as government programs and community initiatives. At PapersOwl too, you can discover numerous free essay illustrations related to America.

How it works

Poverty has been a ongoing, social issue that throughout the years has changed its meaning. Poverty is defined lacking basic necessities such as water, food, shelter, wealth, etc… About fifty years ago, war was declared on poverty by President Johnson hoping that it would end, but fast forward today, it is one of the biggest social issues America is dealing with. We don’t really know why poverty is still occurring, because the reasons seem to always be changing. The reasons for it still occurring is modern times as of right now are social conflict theory, structural functionalism, and symbolic interaction.

One of the reasons that poverty seems to still continue is because of the social conflict approach that happens to be the structure for the belief that views society as a platform of injustice that generates change and conflict. Unlike structural functionalism which we will talk about in the next paragraph, the conflict theory withholds how social structure advocates how society is composed and conveyed, concentrating on how we and others are benefited and suffering from social patterns. “In the United States, inequalities have steadily increased the past 20 years”(Korgen). The conflict theory is used by sociologist by looking at the lasting dispute between improvement and deficiency of people, for instance the relation between the wealth and the underprivileged, the relations between races, and also the relation between genders.

The people that are on top try to defend, conserve and maintain their privileges, at the same time the people who are at a disadvantage in society assemble and acquire more for themselves and their families. Education is one of the many examples that displays inequality of schools and classrooms. Children that are born into an underprivileged house and not being a to receive a full education, as if being born into a wealthier household and having them funds to be able to afford higher eduction such as college, which in the long run will be able provide those children with higher paying careers or jobs in comparison to poor children who are not capable of supporting and providing a way to pay for college or the higher education. In results to not being able to afford college, these students are not able to attain a well paying job. Since these students are not able to attend high education and secure a high income job, these students end up mirroring the patterns of their parents.

The study of our society focusing on the inequality and conflict of racial groups. For example it is believed that the Caucasians have more social power over the nationalities of color. For instance, the powers are looked at to be more education, healthier life styles, and higher quality jobs. Gender conflicts as all the others it focuses on the inequality of women and men. Throughout the decades, men have always had the dominant positions in the work field which contributed to a better salary. To summarize the conflict theory symbols the hierarchical division of society as result of poverty considering the low opportunities from injustice and unfairness towards race, ethnics and gender.

Structural functionalism, what is it? Structional Functionalism is defined as the framework for building theory that sees societies as a complex system, whose parts work together to form a stable and solidarity society. Functionalist look at society as a system of interconnected parts that work together in harmony to maintain balance for the whole. According to Hebert Spencer that the human body which needs all its parts to work properly remembers a social functionalism which needs all parts of society to function. Social structure does not always end good, and have happy outcomes, which as an aftermath of dysfunction interfering with how a society is normal ran or functioning. Poverty is thought-out to be functional since several careers like doctors and attorneys call for more schooling and proficiency rather than jobs working in retail or restaurants which don’t require little to no education and skill. These high paying jobs have been narrowed down to those people that are eager to learn and spend time and money in school while having the mind set that all of their hard work will pay off due to the immense salary they will earn.

Lastly, poverty continues in todays society because a thing called symbolic interaction. Symbolic interaction explains social behavior in terms of how people as a society are interacting with one another. A symbolic interactionist believes a society is an outcome of everyday social interactions of individuals. In the world we live in, there are many symbols with connected meaning to everything interpreting our surroundings, assumptions about people and contracting an identity for ourselves. For instance, wealthy and poor people are portrayed in society completely differently. We as people look at a wealthier person and think of that person as hard-working and well educated, while underprivileged and poor people may be portrayed as inattentive and not well educated.

Finally, it may be concluded as property will always be social issue and looked at as lacking necessities like food, water, shelter. The United States is known to be one of the wealthiest countries in the world, however in “2017 they’re are 12.3% of America population still living in poverty, which works out to be 1 in 8 Americans.” (Pressman) Poverty today is not the same as it was 100’s of years ago, the definition is continuously changing and can be looked at in many different ways such as the conflict approaches, structural functionalism and finally symbolic interaction.  

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Below The Line: Portraits of American Poverty

Correction appended Nov. 18, 2011: A previous version of a caption in this slideshow incorrectly stated that a house had toxic drywall. TIME regrets the error.

In 2010, more Americans lived below the poverty line than at any time since 1959, when the U.S. Census Bureau began collecting this data. Last January, TIME commissioned photographer Joakim Eskildsen to capture the growing crisis, which now affects nearly 46.2 million Americans. Traveling to New York, California, Louisiana, South Dakota and Georgia over seven months, Eskildsen’s photographs of the many types of people who face poverty appear in the new issue of TIME . Eskildsen, who last visited America in 1986, says the poverty crisis was a side of the country he’d rarely seen in the media in Berlin, where he is based. “For Europeans living outside of America, it’s a mythical place because we’re breastfed with all those images of Coca-Cola and American culture,” Eskildsen says. “It was very heartbreaking to see all kinds of people facing poverty because many of these people were not only economically poor, but living in unhealthy conditions overall.”

Eskildsen was also surprised by how pervasive poverty is in America. “Once you start digging, you realize people in poverty are everywhere, and you can really go through your life without seeing them before you yourself are standing in the food stamp line,” he says. “So many people spoke about the disappointment of the American Dream—this, they said, was the American Reality.” In the accompanying magazine story, Barbara Kiviat argues that “there is no single archetype of America’s poor,” and that “understanding what poverty is in reality—and not in myth—is crucial” to efforts to erase the situation. Perhaps equally as crucial is the effort to put a face to the statistic, which Eskildsen has done here in haunting detail.

Joakim Eskildsen is a Danish photographer based in Berlin. He is best known for his book The Roma Journeys (Steidl, 2007) . More of his work can be seen here .

The project was done in collaboration with Natasha Del Toro, reporter for TIME.

Feifei Sun is a reporter at TIME . Find her on Twitter at @Feifei_Sun or on Facebook .

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Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Poverty — Poverty in America

Essays on Poverty in America

Poverty in America is a complex and multifaceted issue that has far-reaching implications for individuals, families, and communities. As a result, it is an important topic for students to explore in their essays. However, choosing the right essay topic on poverty in America can be challenging, as there are so many different aspects of the issue to consider. In this article, we will explore some potential essay topics on poverty in America and provide some tips for writing a high-quality essay on the subject.

Causes of Poverty

One potential essay topic on poverty in America is the causes of poverty. There are many factors that contribute to poverty in the United States, including economic inequality, lack of access to education and healthcare, and systemic racism. Students could explore these factors in their essays and consider how they interact with one another to create and perpetuate poverty in America.

Impact of Poverty

Another potential essay topic is the impact of poverty on individuals and communities. Poverty can have a wide range of negative effects on people's lives, including poor physical and mental health, limited access to education and job opportunities, and increased risk of crime and violence. Students could explore these effects in their essays and consider how they contribute to the cycle of poverty in America.

Solutions to Poverty

Students could also write essays on potential solutions to poverty in America. There are many different approaches that could be taken to address poverty in the United States, including increasing the minimum wage, expanding access to affordable housing and healthcare, and implementing policies to reduce economic inequality. Students could explore these potential solutions in their essays and consider their potential impact on poverty in America.

When choosing a topic for your essay on poverty in America, it's important to consider your own interests and expertise. If you have a particular interest in a specific aspect of poverty in America, such as the impact of poverty on children or the role of government assistance programs, you may want to focus your essay on that topic. By focusing on a topic that you are passionate about, you can create a more compelling and impactful essay.

Poverty in America is a critical issue that deserves careful consideration and exploration. When choosing a topic for your essay on poverty in America, it's important to consider the causes and effects of poverty, as well as potential solutions to the problem. By optimizing your essay for search engines and creating high-quality, engaging content, you can increase its visibility and impact. With careful research and thoughtful writing, you can create a powerful essay that contributes to the ongoing conversation about poverty in America.

Negative Effects of Poverty and Poverty

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Summary of Dorothy Allison's "A Question of Class"

The problem of rural poverty in america, impact of poverty on children and families, the problem of poverty and an urgent need to fix it, let us write you an essay from scratch.

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The Global Issue of Poverty and Its Possible Solutions

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Poverty in America During The Term of Barack Obama in The Article by The Economist

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Why some people receiving federal benefits don’t consider themselves poor − even though poverty rates have increased since the COVID-19  pandemic

Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Wake Forest University

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Sherri Lawson Clark has received funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (1999), The Center for Rural Pennsylvania (2005), The Center for Housing Policy (2008), the Strong@Home Partnership (NC) (2016-19). She is affiliated with Financial Pathways of the Piedmont (NC).

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For the past 25 years, my research as a cultural anthropologist has taken me into the homes and neighborhoods of people living in poverty in cities and rural communities throughout the U.S.

To better understand their day-to-day lives, I also have spent time in grocery stores, churches, nightclubs, parks and health clinics.

I’ve asked countless questions, ranging from how many times they had moved to the types of social services they received.

But of all the answers, none has perplexed me more than the one I receive when I ask, “Are you poor?”

Not one has ever answered yes.

One mother was almost indignant. “My kids have food in their bellies, a roof over their heads, and clothes on their backs, so, no, I’m not poor,” she told me.

A decent standard of living

Who, then, decides who is poor in America?

The answer is the federal government, which has spent nearly the past 60 years trying to define and measure poverty and, ultimately, allocate money to provide families with a financial safety net.

Though many of the people I’ve interviewed over the years did not consider themselves poor, their incomes made them eligible to receive government subsidies such as cash assistance, Medicaid or public housing, thus placing them in categories the government considers poor.

Poverty in the U.S. is based on a person’s ability to purchase the things they need to achieve a certain standard of living. According to 2022 U.S. Census Bureau data – the most recent available – poverty for a family of four was an annual income of at or below US$29,960. For a single person, the poverty threshold was $14,891.

To put those numbers in perspective, the median U.S. household income in 2022 was $74,580 – more than two times the poverty threshold. About 38 million Americans – nearly 12% – live at or below the poverty line. And 16.1 of children under the age of 6 live in poverty.

Measuring US poverty

In the early 1960s, Mollie Orshansky , a government statistician, developed the official poverty measure that is still in use today.

In her earlier statistical work with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Orshansky had calculated that people spend roughly a third of their incomes on food. Known as the bread basket method, the income level used to define poverty was calculated based on the cost of feeding a family.

Since the 1960s, the rate of people living in poverty has held steady between 11% and 15%.

But the measurement has a few shortcomings.

Take the regional differences in costs for the same products. In early 2024, for instance, a loaf of bread in Los Angeles, California, was $4.73, while in Louisville, Kentucky, the same loaf was $2.46.

Another flaw is the definition of what constitutes a family of four members.

The costs of feeding a family of four can be vastly different for a single mother with three school-age children than a married couple with two infant children.

The politics of poverty

Starting in 2011, the second metric that the Census Bureau officials use is the supplemental poverty rate .

Unlike the official poverty rate, the supplemental rate takes into account various types of government aid such as food, housing and energy assistance, as well as tax credits and stimulus payments. The measurement also calculates regional differences in the cost of living, medical care and housing.

Though distinct, these two measurements are often used by politicians to score points over their political rivals.

Such was the case in September 2023 when the Census Bureau found that the supplemental rate had spiked from 7.8% in 2021 to 12.4% in 2022, the largest increase since 2010.

The same measurement for the share of children living in poverty also hit 12.4%, more than doubling from 5.2% in 2021.

When the numbers were released by the Census Bureau in September 2023, former President Donald Trump immediately attacked President Joe Biden and compared the decline in poverty during his presidency with an increase in poverty during Biden’s term.

But Trump left out key facts.

The supplemental rates did decline from 14% in 2016, before Trump took office in 2017, to 9.2% in his last full year as president in 2020 . But the drop was due in large part to coronavirus relief payments that were made available to qualifying people and families during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The relief payments also helped lower the number of people in poverty under the Biden administration.

But those COVID-19 era payments expired in 2021. Without that same aid – and help from Biden’s American Rescue Plan – the share of people considered poor went up in 2022 under Biden. The sharp increase that year came on the heels of the previous year when the percentage of people in poverty was at its lowest level on record.

Temporary relief?

Starting after the Great Depression, U.S. presidents have made reducing poverty a priority in their administrations. Most notably, Franklin D. Roosevelt had the New Deal and Lyndon Johnson had the Great Society .

But thus far during the 2024 presidential campaign, the issue of reducing poverty has been overshadowed by Trump’s legal troubles and Biden’s inability to force an end to the Israel-Hamas war.

In the world’s richest nation, more than 23 million people – a little more than 1 in 10 adults – live in households where there was not enough food to eat, according to the Census Bureau’s March 2024 Household Pulse Survey . And many of these people have jobs.

Despite trillions of U.S. dollars spent on lifting people out of poverty – $1.9 trillion in 2022 alone – it appears the federal government’s ability to provide a safety net for all those in need has fallen short.

As economist Bob Pfeiffer once said: “Our welfare system is designed to make lives more comfortable, not to solve poverty.”

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Essay on Poverty In America

Students are often asked to write an essay on Poverty In America in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Poverty In America

What is poverty.

Poverty means not having enough money to live comfortably. In America, many people struggle to pay for food, a place to live, and doctor visits. It’s a big problem that affects children, adults, and families.

Causes of Poverty

People can be poor for many reasons. Sometimes they lose jobs, get sick, or have no education. In America, not everyone has the same chances, which makes it harder for some to earn money.

Life in Poverty

Living with little money is tough. Imagine choosing between buying food or paying for the bus. This is a daily reality for some Americans. They often feel alone and without hope.

Fighting Poverty

America tries to reduce poverty by giving food stamps and health care help. Schools also give free lunches to kids who need them. Charities and kind people also give support.

Poverty in America is a serious issue. It’s important to understand why it happens and how it affects people. By working together, we can help make everyone’s lives better.

250 Words Essay on Poverty In America

Understanding poverty in america.

Poverty means not having enough money to take care of basic needs like food, clothing, and a place to live. In America, many people struggle with poverty. It is a big problem that affects both cities and small towns.

Who is Poor?

Anyone can face poverty, but it often affects children, old people, and families with only one parent more than others. People who do not have a job or those who work but earn very little money are at risk too. Being poor can mean different things, like not being able to go to the doctor when sick or not having enough food.

Reasons Behind Poverty

There are many reasons why people are poor. Some lost their jobs, while others may have a sickness that makes it hard to work. Education is also important. Without good education, it’s tough to find a job that pays well. Sometimes, the place where people live has fewer jobs, which makes finding work harder.

Helping Those in Need

America has some ways to help people who are poor. There are food banks that give away food and programs that help pay for houses. Schools often provide free meals to students who need them. Yet, there are still many people who need help.

Poverty in America is a serious issue that needs attention. By understanding who is affected and why, and by knowing how to help, we can work on making things better for everyone. It’s important for everyone, including kids, to learn about this problem so we can all be part of the solution.

500 Words Essay on Poverty In America

Poverty in America is a serious issue where many people do not have enough money to meet their basic needs like food, clothing, and a place to live. It’s not just about being hungry or homeless; it’s also about not being able to go to the doctor when you’re sick or not having a safe place to sleep.

Who is Affected?

Anyone can face poverty, but it often affects children, old people, and families who do not have a person with a well-paying job. Some areas in cities and the countryside are poorer than others. This means that in some neighborhoods, many people might not have jobs, and schools might not have enough money for books or computers.

There are many reasons why people are poor. Sometimes, jobs do not pay enough, or there are not enough jobs for everyone who needs one. Education is another reason. If a person hasn’t had the chance to go to school or learn a skill, it’s harder for them to find a good job. Also, if someone gets sick and doesn’t have insurance, they might have to spend a lot of money on doctors and medicine, which can lead to poverty.

Living in poverty is very tough. Imagine not knowing where your next meal will come from or being cold because you can’t afford a warm coat. Kids might not have the same chances as others because their parents can’t afford things like books or trips to the museum. Poverty can make people feel alone and without hope.

Thankfully, there are ways to help people in poverty. The government has programs that give money, food, and health care to those who need it. Charities and churches also help by giving food, clothes, and sometimes places to stay. People can volunteer their time or donate things they don’t need anymore.

What Can We Do?

Everyone can do something to fight poverty. If you get an allowance, you could save some to give to a food bank. You can also learn more about poverty and tell others, so more people understand the problem. Even small actions, like being kind to someone who doesn’t have much, can make a big difference.

Poverty in America is a big problem, but it’s not impossible to fix. When people work together to help those in need and create opportunities for everyone, things can get better. Remember, even as a student, you have the power to make a change in your community.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

• Essay on Poverty And Inequality
• Essay on Poverty And Environment
• Essay on Positive Thinking

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Discussion: Poverty in America Essay

Introduction.

The American Dream pioneers the idea that hard work and resilience ultimately lead to social mobility and a higher quality of life, regardless of an individual’s visible features and background. However, for some individuals, achieving the United States’ promises is a far-fetched utopia because they barely have enough to make it through the day despite tirelessly serving others for minimum wage. Poverty is a cancer that has eaten away human dignity, obligating some people to find solace in the streets, drugs, and violent crimes because the government does not pay attention to their plight. Women and children in marginalized areas suffer the most because of their susceptibility to social and environmental factors. I believe that poverty in the US results from corruption and an immoral society that places issues such as race above human life. Therefore, by eradicating these vices, the government can improve people’s living standards and promote their well-being.

The Factors that Influenced My Selection

I come from a family with a strong religious background, which has allowed me to observe high moral standards since I was young. As a toddler, my parents taught me that sharing with others was the best possible value for humans. Notably, this concept was beneficial in our household because I have several siblings and occasionally spent time with cousins who visited during the holiday. Therefore, I grew up believing that people live in a society where they freely give out what they have to others and peacefully live to see another day. However, my transition into adulthood revealed otherwise, as individuals in some areas barely have food to eat and lack basic needs such as clothes and shelter. In contrast, others spend thousands of dollars on beauty products, luxurious cars, jewelry, and lavish lifestyles. Hence, the disparities that exist in human society are unimaginable because some people have more money and financial resources than they can spend, while others suffer from absolute poverty.

Another reason for my belief is because the evidence and implications of poverty are visible in the community. Nevertheless, society neglects the actual causes of its problems and instead targets individuals. Suburban areas and marginalized regions in America have unique but strikingly similar features. Notably, many African Americans and LatinX individuals populate disempowered communities, suggesting that poverty is strongly associated with racism. In addition, these areas exhibit high disease, crime, and drug abuse rates due to limited resources to counter contributors. As a result, their generations continue becoming disempowered as they lack the facilities to enhance their skills in particular areas and make a decent living. Although I come from a small community in a rural area, it is easy to note the social and economic differences that exist between individuals due to their racial backgrounds. Therefore, these issues warrant more attention and prompt action because neglecting them worsens the situation and risks the future of Americans by eroding the workforce and human resources.

American leaders and the media also influenced my belief that poverty in America as a rising concern because they contribute to the inequalities that aggravate the status of suffering individuals. The US political arena resembles a circus where a power struggle between the two most popular political parties is evident and is often the main agenda in presidential elections. In addition, leaders are often caught up in corruption scandals, including embezzlement, fraud, extortion, and bribery, but somehow convince people that they serve societal interests. Therefore, the politicians’ failure to focus on their obligations to the people and their self-centredness is disappointing because they are appointed by the communities they abuse. Similarly, the media contribute to the advancement of poverty in the US because they focus on broadcasting news that catches individuals’ attention and garners the most views instead of creating awareness of the need for social change. Thus, the media and political leaders are partially to blame for the economic status of marginalized communities. in the US because their habits and negligence allow perpetrators of societal vices to walk free.

My education and field of study influence my belief that poverty in the US as a problem facilitated by human errors and, thus, preventable using appropriate approaches and support mechanisms. Stakeholders at the state and federal levels in the US do not prioritize poverty eradication in communities as most people would expect because they neglect critical sectors like healthcare and education to finance projects such as space exploration. Additionally, weighing the implications of poverty, including high crime rates, the prevalence of disease, and drug abuse, it is reasonable to set up preventive strategies by addressing the factors that contribute to poverty and gradually dealing with them (Ortega 7). Several resources and professionals can lead individuals in authority in the right direction in matters of reducing poverty. Researchers have established several concepts as to why some areas experience higher rates of poverty than others despite numerous community initiatives to improve outcomes. Therefore, the government should take advantage of this information to establish short and long-term solutions to the advancement of poverty.

Evidence of Factors that Contribute to Poverty and Recommendations

Poverty in America is a multidimensional phenomenon affecting individuals in various industries, including schools, neighborhoods, and institutions. As a developed country, one would expect the US to have the lowest poverty levels. However, the poverty rates in US communities continuously rise because of factors such as limited human vitality and economic mobility (Desmond and Bruce 306). In addition, individuals experience economic constraints because of stagnant wages, rising income volatility, and increasing housing prices. As a result, some individuals hardly make ends meet and are forced to live substandard lifestyles. Nevertheless, the mechanisms contributing to poverty are deeply rooted in American history and the European culture of suppressing minorities (Desmond and Bruce 309). In the past, colonialists sought to justify their atrocities against African Americans by disregarding their humanity. Thus, discrimination and inequalities exasperated by public policies facilitate intense poverty as wealthy individuals benefit from the marginalized while white people have the upper hand against the non-white. Therefore, dealing with financial constraints requires addressing their root causes and facilitators.

Racism, ethnicity, and socioeconomic determinants such as individuals’ health and income levels are strong indicators of poverty because they affect access to resources and opportunities to enhance their livelihoods. A study by Ortega suggests that minorities exhibit higher poverty levels than white people, with a higher prevalence among African Americans and American Indians (Ortega 7). The study suggests that minority races have limited access to education, employment, and social opportunities to address their issues compared to regions dominated by white neighborhoods. Similarly, disabled individuals and those with poor health are more likely to be poor than healthy people. Moreover, women in the US are marginalized and often limited from accessing development opportunities, as in the case of men, thus increasing the number of mothers living under the poverty lines (Ortega 22). These factors indicate high levels of unfairness and injustice in American society, which plunges more people into poverty.

The media is scrutinized for its role in advancing poverty levels among marginalized groups because it reinforces narratives that misguide their audiences and diminish the severity of poverty in the US. Media institutions often blame poverty on a lack of efforts to excel by people affected and personal weaknesses that have nothing to do with the system (Miller et al. 8). Although the media is responsible for shedding light on critical issues that affect human life, they prioritize issues such as politics, sports, and entertainment (Desmond and Bruce 309). For example, the media does not always pay attention to individuals’ suffering in our community but is quick to report crimes like homicide and other issues that attract the attention of individuals for a short time. Social media has become an important tool in shedding light on human rights violations and issues such as income inequalities (Miller 43). However, more than 57% of individuals who receive news through social media rarely believe in their sources and prefer obtaining information from television stations. Some channels propagate the notion that poverty is the result of minority cultures, more specifically in the case of black individuals, because they contribute to their situations by engaging in crimes and misdemeanors. Similarly, some individuals purport that poverty is a natural occurrence with a cause in society (Miller et al. 18). As a result, these ideologies turn people’s attention away from the actual issues and prevent them from taking action against vices that facilitate poverty.

Poverty has significant implications for the community and the US as a nation because it limits continuous advancements and risks the prosperity of future generations. Financial constraints reduce life expectancy because they expose individuals to environmental risks such as disease, low-quality education, and poor living standards (Khullar and Dave 5). In addition, constantly struggling to make ends meet is associated with mental conditions like depression, stress, and anxiety. Moreover, high levels of poverty drive individuals into crimes such as robbery and assault, thus resulting in increased insecurity and incarceration of marginalized individuals(Khullar and Dave 11). In effect, poverty disproportionately affects minorities as it exposes them to social constraints that prevent their development. Therefore, it is necessary to adopt reliable solutions to counter the causes and effects of poverty before the situation gets out of hand.

Social workers play a significant role in championing the fight against social issues like poverty because of their professional oaths and duty to the people. Some solutions that human service practitioners can adopt include collaboration, activism, and advocacy against societal vices that promote poverty. That said, social workers should create awareness of the adversities that poverty imposes on the community and inform individuals of strategies to tackle vices such as corruption and racially instigated discrimination (Wilfong and Angeline 72). Working together to support policies that call for change and continuously advocating for the acknowledgment of marginalized groups can open up opportunities for improvement. Moreover, social work education should involve strategies to eradicate poverty, as this knowledge goes a long way in guiding policy formulation and supporting positive professional development (Wilfong and Angeline 75). Nevertheless, these initiatives must be rigorous to warrant the attention of authorities and positive changes.

Poverty in the US is slowly eating away populations and introducing several setbacks to national development. In addition, poverty erodes the advancements the US has made over the past centuries to ensure democracy because it causes suffering and discomfort. Contrary to the misleading news displayed by the media, poverty is a result of social vices such as racism, discrimination, gender inequality, and injustice. Therefore, it is critical to address these issues to pave the way for significant advancements in poverty eradication. Although leaders are responsible for individuals’ well-being, they neglect their duties and instead focus on propaganda. Nevertheless, social workers are in the best position to champion notable changes due to their oath and access to resources. Social workers should create awareness, collaborate in advocacy, and champion progressive policies to reduce unfairness and marginalization. Otherwise, it will be easier to eradicate these vices if society changes its perspectives on the value of human life.

Works Cited

Desmond, Matthew, and Bruce Western. “ Poverty in America: New Directions And Debates .” Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 44, no.1, 2018, pp. 305–18. Web.

Khullar, Dhruv, and Dave A. Chokshi. “ Health, Income, & Poverty: Where We Are & What Could Help .” Health Affairs , vol. 10, 2018. Web.

Miller, Theresa L., et al. “ Talking about poverty: Narratives, counter-narratives, and telling effective stories .” Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute , 2021. Web.

Ortega, Lesley. “The Effect of Race/Ethnicity, Health Status and Socioeconomic Variables on Poverty in the US.” The Park Place Economist , vol. 29, no.1, 2022, pp. 7. Web.

Wilfong, Jordan, and Angeline Cirino. “ How Social Workers Can Address Poverty in America .” Reflections: Narratives of Professional Helping , vol. 27, no.2, 2021, pp. 71–77. Web.

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Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Discussion: Poverty in America." April 28, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/discussion-poverty-in-america/.

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