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As a result, the typical one-parent family with children was far better off working than on welfare, and employment rates among this group increased dramatically, due to the strong economy of the 1990s, welfare reform, and the availability of these expanded work supports

The value of these new work support programs at both the federal and state level cannot be overemphasized. The EITC alone provides roughly $4,000 a year in extra benefits to a low-wage worker with two or more children, and the children remain eligible for Medicaid. The average woman leaving welfare earns about $7 an hour, or $13,000 in after-tax income. The combined value of food stamps and the EITC, then, brings her total income up to about $19,000—enough to boost a single parent family with three or fewer children above the federal poverty line

Polls show that the public is willing to do more for those who work.

Many of these policies respond to complaints that the 1996 welfare law placed too much emphasis on reducing caseloads and not enough on reducing poverty.

The work support system serves three primary goals. First, it provides incentives for work.

A second goal of the work support system is to help ensure that parents working at low-wage jobs have enough total income to provide an adequate standard of living.

The third goal of the work support system is to insure that those who lose their jobs or cannot find work will not be destitute.

The minimum wage is not very well-targeted. Only one quarter of minimum-wage earners live in poor families.

By 2000, the federal EITC was providing over $30 billion in cash supplements to working families, making it the biggest program other than Medicaid and Supplemental Security Income that provides benefits to low-income families. And unlike nearly every other program for low-income families, it provides benefits only to families that work. It is, in short, the quintessential work support program.

States have taken two major approaches to improving work incentives. First, since enactment of the 1996 reforms, nearly every state has allowed parents who find jobs to retain more of their welfare benefit. This policy enables many families to work and continue receiving earnings supplements from welfare.

under current federal rules, working families can exhaust their five-year limit on welfare while receiving just a small supplement to their earnings. For this reason, time limits may actually discourage work

A second approach states have followed is to create their own EITC programs.

nearly all the families leaving welfare are eligible for food stamps

less than half the families leaving welfare receive the food stamp benefits to which they are entitled.

Since the late 1960s, the poverty rate for people over 65 has fallen dramatically.

The poverty rate for people in households headed by single women is significantly higher than the overall poverty rate.

In 2010, 19.9 percent of foreign-born residents lived in poverty, compared to 14.4 percent of residents born in the United States. Foreign-born, non-citizens had an even higher incidence of poverty, at a rate of 26.7 percent.

Children represent a disproportionate share of the poor in the United States; they are 24 percent of the total population, but 36 percent of the poor population.

The official poverty measure has been criticized for not accounting for several factors that can affect a family's economic well-being and for not having been updated, except for inflation, for four decades. 

For example, while cash benefits from government assistance programs are included in a family's income when calculating the official poverty measure, benefits received in-kind such as food stamps, Medicare or Medicaid, employer provided health insurance, housing subsidies, and other social services are excluded.  Taxes that families pay and tax credits they receive such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) do not enter into the official poverty determination.

Additionally, the threshold value a family must earn to escape poverty was developed in the 1960s by combining emergency food budget data from the US Department of Agriculture with an estimate of what fraction of income families spend on food. Although the thresholds are adjusted each year for inflation, some analysts believe that these numbers no longer accurately reflect the minimal resources a family requires.

These alternative measures tend to show lower levels of poverty than the official measure in any year, but the timing of increases and decreases in the poverty rate is very similar across measures. This similarity suggests that, despite the criticism it receives, the official poverty measure provides a reliable indicator of changes in the poverty rate from year to year.

These alternative definitions tend to show higher levels of overall poverty than the official measures in any year, although the difference is usually less than one percentage point.

Another problem which got worse during the crisis, but was growing beforehand, is suburban poverty.

As of 2008 more than a third of America’s poor live in suburbs.

The number of poor people living in the suburbs grew 53% between 2000 and 2010

The eightfold growth in the prison population from 1970 to 2010 has turned ever more poor decisions into poor lives.

Most poor children live in single-parent homes, and most families that are poor lack married parents.

The amount the federal government spends on food stamps hit a record $75.7 billion in the 2011 fiscal year—more than double the level of 2008. Enrolment in Medicaid, through which federal and state governments provide health care to low-income Americans, has grown every year since 2008, though its 2012 growth was the slowest since the recession began, and its spending grew at a lower level than enrolment because of federal and state cost-control measures. In 2011 states disbursed $113.3 billion in unemployment benefits to 9.9m recipients, as well as roughly $16.6 billion received in block grants as part of a federal programme called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

America is unusually reluctant, compared with other rich countries, about giving cash transfers to the poor.

Its benefits skew overwhelmingly toward families: the most a single person can claim is around $500, while a married couple with three or more dependent children can receive $5,000 or more. In 2010 $55 billion was paid out through the EITC, and $23 billion for the child tax credit.

In 2011, the poverty rate not including unemployment insurance or Social Security would have been 7.8 percentage points higher, and it would have been 3.1 points lower if you take food stamps and EITC into account. So all told, these four government programs reduced poverty by 10.9 percent, or 33.6 million people.