The federal government began measuring poverty in 1959. During the 1960s President Lyndon Baines Johnson declared a national war on poverty. Researchers realized that very few statistical tools were available to measure the number of Americans who continued to live in poverty in one of the most affluent nations in the world. In order to fight this "war," it had to be determined who w…
Since the late 1950s, Americans have seen some successes and some failures in the battle against poverty. For the total population in 1959, 22.4 percent, or 39.5 million persons, lived below the poverty level. After an initial decline through the 1960s and 1970s, the poverty rate began to increase during the early 1980s, coinciding with TABLE 3.1 Department of Health and Human Services povert…
In its surveys, the U.S. Bureau of the Census differentiates between households and families. A "household" is an individual living alone or a group of persons living together who may or may not be related, while a "family" is composed of two or more related individuals. All families are households, but not all households are families. In 2002 there were over 111.2 mill…
Both conservatives and liberals hailed the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (PL 99-514) as a major step toward relieving the tax burden of low-income families, one group of Americans whose wages and benefits have been eroding since 1979. The law enlarged and "inflation-proofed" the TABLE 3.7 Median income in 2001 and 2002 (Households and people as of March of the following year) Earne…
Almost every year since the U.S. Bureau of the Census first defined the poverty level, observers have been concerned about the accuracy of the estimated poverty level. The figure had been based on the finding that the average family in the mid-1950s spent about one-third of its income on food. That figure was multiplied by three to allow for expenditures on all other goods and services. This repre…
When thinking of the consequences of poverty, people often visualize the poor being badly housed or, in the worst case, homeless, instead of people not having enough to eat. While it may be hard to imagine some Americans not having enough to eat, many Americans go to bed hungry or experience times when there is not enough food for the family. During the 1980s a growing number of studies found that…
America's Second Harvest is the nation's largest charitable hunger-relief organization, serving 23.3 million FIGURE 3.7 Prevalence of hunger, 2001 and 2002 persons per year. In 2001 Mathematica Policy Research conducted a landmark study of the Second Harvest network by means of interviews with 32,000 clients and 24,000 questionnaires from local agencies. The findings are repor…
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