How Poor Are the Poor? - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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“Anyone who studies the issue seriously understands that material poverty has continued to fall in the U.S. in recent decades, primarily due to the success of anti-poverty programs” and the declining cost of “food, air-conditioning, communications, transportation, and entertainment,”
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Despite the rising optimism, there are disagreements over how many poor people there are and the conditions they live under. There are also questions about the problem of relative poverty, what we are now calling inequality
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Jencks argues that the actual poverty rate has dropped over the past five decades – far below the official government level — if poverty estimates are adjusted for food and housing benefits, refundable tax credits and a better method of determining inflation rates. In Jencks’s view, the war on poverty worked.
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