Table of Contents:
Page 2-5: Evaluation of poverty rate and suggested improvements
Page 6-8: Causes of U.S income inequality
Page 9-10: Describe and evaluate the welfare reform efforts of the past decade. What measures are still needed?
Page 10-12: Scriptures View On Poverty
Page 13-14: Bibliography
Evaluation of poverty rate and suggested improvements
Who are the poor in United States? The World Bank defines the poor as those who live on less than $2 a day. In the United States, however the most common way of measuring poverty is if a family’s income falls below the official “threshold of poverty”. The United States Census Bureau defines those being below the threshold of poverty as, “households who do not have a sufficient income to meet minimal food and basic needs.” The poverty threshold varies between households with more or less occupants and members under the age of 18 or over the age of 65. For example a household with one member under the age of 18-65 in 2014 has a weighted threshold average of 12,119 per year, while a household with one member over the age of 65 have a threshold of 11,173 (Census Bureau, 2014).
U.S. poverty was first measured in the 1960’s through the Social Security Administration, under the help of economist Mollie Orshansky. Orshansky helped establish the official poverty threshold, by using the cost of the Department of Agriculture’s economical food plan. She estimated families in United States spent on average a third of their income on food and, thus conceived the poverty threshold should be three times the of minimal food requirements for adequate living. In 1969, the U.S. government adopted her poverty threshold as the official statistical definition of poverty (Kolesnikova and, Liu 2012),
One very disconcerting finding of the poverty threshold is it
