Tuesday, June 15, 2010

bad company

This is a worthy flashback to 2007: In "US Economy Leaving Record Numbers in Severe Poverty," Tony Pugh puts some perspective on how little the U.S. allocates toward poverty reduction:
With the exception of Mexico and Russia, the U.S. devotes the smallest portion of its gross domestic product to federal anti-poverty programs, and those programs are among the least effective at reducing poverty, the study found. Again, only Russia and Mexico do worse jobs. One in three Americans will experience a full year of extreme poverty at some point in his or her adult life, according to long-term research by Mark Rank, a professor of social welfare at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

1 comment:

Elaine said...

There's a new poverty measure being released, which will account for cost of living differences in various places and have an updated view of what a minimum standard is. (Previous measure was a minimum food budget * 3, adjusted for inflation annually.) In addition, programs that _do_ help poor families that are not currently counted in the measure - namely, the Earned Income Tax Credit - will be included in this measure. This statistic will be published alongside the standard poverty measure, and provide some important context for things the US does do.