Poverty

4 Pages 939 Words

Poverty
What exactly is poverty and who does it effect? Many people don’t fully
understand what poverty is and don’t think it occurs in the United states. But the truth is
that it does effect families and communities in the United States. In 2000, according to
the official measure, over eleven percent of the total U.S. population lived in poverty
(U.S. Bureau). So the U.S. citizens need to understand certain concepts of poverty
including; how poverty is measured in the United States, who are poor in the United
States, and what does the government do to help out families in poverty.
Poverty in the United States is calculated by a poverty measure developed by
Mollie Orshansky during the mid-1960’s. Orshansky was a social science research analyst
at the Social Security Administration. She began publishing articles with poverty statistics
for the United States using a poverty calculation that she had developed. Orshansky’s
measure had two components, a set of income thresholds and a definition of family income
to be compared with those thresholds. She developed her poverty threshold by taking the
cost of a minimum diet for families of different sizes and multiplied the cost by three to
allow for other expenses. Poor families were those whose yearly income was below the
threshold for a family of a given size (Poverty Guidelines). In 1965 the U.S. Office of
Economic Opportunity adopted the Social Security Administration thresholds as a
working definition of poverty for statistical purposes and for program planning. In 1969
the U.S. Bureau of the Budget, now known as the U.S. Office of Management and
Budget, issued a directive that made the thresholds the federal government’s official
statistical definition of poverty (Dalaker and Proctor). In 1967, the Census Bureau began
to publish annual poverty statistics calculating the number and percentage of people in
poverty by using the calculations dev...