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Mr Obama’s re-election and Democratic control of the Senate give federal anti-poverty programmes a level of security they would have lacked under a Romney administration. But America’s poor face systemic challenges beyond the aid of any single administration or programme.

Most counties exhibiting persistent poverty—meaning counties with poverty rates of 20% or higher, consistently, from 1990 to 2010—are indeed in rural America (see map).

For most, poverty will be a temporary condition; chronic poverty remains relatively rare. But it does seem to be growing more common.

United States Census bureau has produced what may become another landmark reference. Based on an updated method for assessing poverty, the bureau has found that far more Americans are scraping by than was previously known: 100 million Americans — one in three — are “deep poor,” “poor,” or “near poor.”

As Harrington observed, poverty is more than lacking minimum standards of health care, housing, food and education. “Poverty,” he wrote, “should be defined psychologically in terms of those whose place in the society is such that they are internal exiles who, almost inevitably, develop attitudes of defeat and pessimism and who are therefore excluded from taking advantage of new opportunities.”

Researchers in the United Kingdom have developed tools to measure “well-being,” looking at such things as material goods, relationships and self-beliefs.

About 97.3 million Americans fall into a low-income category, commonly defined as those earning between 100 and 199 percent of the poverty level, based on a new supplemental measure by the Census Bureau that is designed to provide a fuller picture of poverty. Together with the 49.1 million who fall below the poverty line and are counted as poor, they number 146.4 million, or 48 percent of the U.S. population. That is up by 4 million from 2009, the earliest numbers for the newly developed poverty measure.

Among low-income families, about one-third were considered poor while the remainder, 6.9 million, earned income just above the poverty line.

Firstpost Economy ‘Why television is more important than food’ by Vivek Kaul Dec 14, 2012 #Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee #India #Morocco #Poverty #VeryCloseUp Share 21 0 8 Email13 Comments Print Adult Vaccinations Learn More About a Pertussis Vaccine for Adults. SoundsOfPertussis.comExclusive Masaba Gupta Designer Dresses,Saris And Jackets. Available Only @Pernia's PopupShop perniaspopupshop.com/Free-Shippinghttp://www.google.com/url?ct=abg&q=https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/request.py%3Fcontact%3Dabg_afc%26url%3Dhttp://www.firstpost.com/economy/why-television-is-more-important-than-food-557010.html/2%26gl%3DUS%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dca-money_t

People with vouchers had were worse off in  nutrition. They felt that now that they have the vouchers, they are rich and no longer need to eat rice. They could eat pork, shrimps etc. They went and bought pork and shrimps and as a result their net calories went down. This is perfectly rational. These people were waiting for pleasure.

They could improve their nutrition or for the next ten days they could also eat a little bit better. Fun is something that we forget about.

The methodology for calculating the thresholds was established in the mid-1960s and has not changed in the intervening years.

Money income does not include noncash benefits such as public housing, Medicaid, employer-provided health insurance and food stamps

The poverty rate for children has historically been somewhat higher than the overall poverty rate.

most people don’t understand what it exactly means to be poor and how the decisions made by the poor might be irrational to us but are very rational decisions given the situation they are in.

We were in a village in Morocco talking to a guy who was standing in front of his house. He was telling us about his life and to get the conversation going we asked him, suppose you had some small amount of money what would you do with it? And he said, “I am going to buy some food.” And then we asked him what would he do if he had some more money? He said, “I will buy more food.” So we were very persuaded that this was a hungry man. We walk into his house and see that he had a television, a parabolic antenna and a DVD player. So we asked him what is this? He said, entirely without missing a step, “television is more important than food.”

One thing uniform across the world is that an evening in a village is very boring. There are no movie theatres. No music halls. No place to go. There is one tea shop. You can go there. You have been there before. All the other people have been there for years. They have talked to each other for years and they say the same things more or less.

the effects of the government programs are still large. The programs reduced poverty for children under 18 by 8.8 percent (or 6.5 million children) and for people 18-64 by 6.1 percent (or 11.8 million people).

Government programs reduce poverty among seniors by 36 percent, and 34.9 percent of that decrease is due to Social Security.

Were it not for Social Security, 43.6 percent of seniors would be poor. That’s 14.5 million seniors that one program is keeping afloat.

The Pew Research Center said its recent polling shows that a majority of Americans – for the first time in 15 years of being surveyed on the question – oppose more government spending to help the poor.

many people remain at risk of finding themselves on the street, especially poor families.

The number of homeless veterans declined by more than 17 percent between January 2009 and January of this year. The population of the chronically homeless fell by more than 19 percent between 2007 and 2012.

But while conditions may be improving for homeless individuals, they may be getting worse for families with children, who have costlier needs and therefore fewer housing options

Among other provisions, the 1996 reforms required work of almost every adult that joined the welfare rolls. In addition, with some exceptions, a limit of five years was placed on the receipt of cash welfare by individual families.

Beginning roughly in the mid-1970s with the enactment of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), the federal government originated or expanded a series of programs that provide benefits to working families. Unlike welfare benefits, which are intended primarily for the destitute, these work support benefits are designed to provide cash and other benefits to working adults and their families. In addition to the EITC, the major benefits in the system include the child tax credit, the minimum wage, state income supplement programs, food stamps, health insurance, and child care.

This evolution toward a work-based system of support progressed further as a result of state responses to the 1996 welfare law.