The Truth About How Many Americans Are Living on Less Than $2 a Day
Leah Jessen
Politics,
What you need to know.
Over the last 20 years, welfare reform has reduced poverty trends, national welfare experts say.
President Bill Clinton signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996. This comprehensive, bipartisan welfare reform act contains work requirements and supports families moving from welfare to work.
After the law went into effect, welfare rolls dropped by 60 percent, employment among low-income Americans rose, and poverty rates for single mothers dropped to historic lows.
“The official poverty rate, this would be about $17 per day per person, drops dramatically after welfare reform,” Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, said Tuesday during a lecture at Heritage.
Rector, who played a key role in writing the original Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) legislation 20 years ago, says there has been a downward trend in official poverty levels. He says that both regular poverty and deep poverty are trending downward and there has been a reduction in dependency.
In Kathryn Edin and Luke Schaefer’s book “$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America,” Edin and Schaefer allege that 4 percent of all families with children live on less than $2 per person per day and that poverty is on the rise.
Of about 273,000 observations in a government survey collected over a 30-year period, researchers found 61 instances of families spending less than $2 per person per day. Extreme poverty levels of $2 per day per person are consistent with poverty standards in Third World nations.
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