Poverty in the USA Article Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Poverty in the USA - Article ExampleSo in that location are statistical and social definitions of poverty, as well as a mixture of both methods. brotherly definition includes the concept of empowerment and human development (Think Quest, 2006). In other words, ...objective measures of poverty present many problems in terms of identifying the poor, but succeed in providing the aggregate statistics policy makers desire (Maxwell, 1999, p. 3).Most of the cartridge clip emphasis is made on defining and measuring poverty thresholds and poverty lines, but some researchers indicate that policy makers should define and measure poverty in terms of self-sufficiency (Mutari, 2001) or the level of income that a person or a family really needs to live a life free of worries intimately economical and human development issues.In the United States poverty began to be measured in the fifties based on a survey that showed that families spent about one-third of their incomes on food. Mollie Orsha nsky, an economist from the Social Security Administration, set the poverty threshold at three times the cost of an miserliness food plan defined by the Department of Agriculture (University of Michigan, 2001). The thresholds are updated yearly and vary check to the size and age composition of a family (US Census Bureau, 2009).Frank states that using these income levels, the Census Bureau report that 12.7% percent of U.S. residents and 17.8% of U.S. children lived in poverty in 2004. Black Americans experience poverty at nearly triplex these rates 24.9% of all Blacks and 33.3% of Black children live in households with incomes below the poverty line (Frank, 2006).Most of the researchers and experts restrain that the poverty line is far too low for a household to survive on in most parts of the United States (Frank, 2006). Researchers Pearce and Brooks found that a single parent living in the Bronx with two children, one in school and one in daycare, would need a gross income of $3,684 per month