4 Poverty and Welfare in America Mettler, S. Soldiers to Citizens: The GI Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Monkeen, E., ed. Walking to Work: Tramps in America, 1790–1935. Lin- coln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. Montgomery, D. Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Patterson, J. America’s Struggle Against Poverty, 1900–1985. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Skocpol, T. Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Origin of Social Policy in the United States. Belknap Press, 1995. Trattner, W. From Poor Law to Welfare State. London: The Free Press, 1989. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. http://aspe.hhs.gov /poverty/15poverty.cfm. U. S. Department of Census. https://www.census.gov/topics/income-pov erty/poverty.html. Q2. WHAT IS THE “POVERTY RATE” AND DOES IT MEASURE POVERTY? Answer: The poverty level is a statistic based on a study now more than 50 years old that showed food was about a third of the costs in low-income people’s budgets. Although the measure has been challenged by many, it is useful at least in a comparative way. Poverty declined in the 1960s in the United States but then leveled off and moved upward in the last few decades. There is also a wide disparity among states in the United States in terms of their poverty levels. The Facts: Like many concepts, poverty is a broad term that is hard to define. For this reason, in the late 1950s, the U.S. government set out to define a poverty line or rate that it could use in its programs both for mea- surement and for determining who is eligible for a variety of government assistance programs. In the late 1950s, a survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Agri- culture found the average low-income family spent one-third of its income for a market basket of food, which was defined as an “Economy Food Plan” prepared and priced by government (Iceland, 2013, p. 24). Adapting this finding, the U.S. government developed a poverty rate that took food costs, multiplied it by three and by family size, and multiplied in the infla- tion rate each year. This may be graphically represented as the following:
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