1 General Questions about Poverty To begin, this text will tackle the most common questions surrounding poverty and the poor in the United States. These questions and answers will serve as a framework for the more specific subject areas covered within subsequent parts of the text. Q1. HAVE POVERTY LEVELS RISEN IN RECENT DECADES IN THE UNITED STATES? Answer: Yes. Compared to the first nearly two hundred years of Ameri- can history, the era of post–World War II prosperity (approximately 1946–1973), along with social welfare changes beginning with the Social Security Act of the 1930s, brought American poverty rates down. How- ever, since the recession of 1973–1974 the poverty rate has been edging up steadily, and many critics believe it is a low estimate in today’s world. The Facts: Although many history books skip over the facts about poverty in the United States, poor people have always been present and at times constituted a large percentage of the population. It is difficult to get exact figures because of the absence of agreed-upon poverty rates before 1959, but some historians estimate that as many as half of Ameri- ca’s population was impoverished between the decades after the Civil War and the First World War (Monkeen, 1984 Montgomery, 1993). These
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