What You Should Know about Poverty in America

Poverty is a big deal – it affects about 41 million people in the United States every year – yet the federal government spends a huge amount of money to end poverty. How can this be? And how do we even measure poverty in the first place? This week on Words and Numbers, Antony Davies and James R. Harrigan answer these questions and delve into what can be done to help the poor.

Watch the video below or here on YouTube or listen to the podcast here on SoundCloud.

For more on this, see:

• Measuring Poverty Using Both Income and Wealth: An Empirical Comparison of Multidimensional Approaches Using Data for the US and Spain
• The American Welfare State: How We Spend Nearly $1 Trillion a Year Fighting Poverty – and Fail
• No, We Don't Need to Spend $1 Trillion on Welfare Each Year
• The Right Amount of Government
• The Basic Income Guarantee: Simplicity, But at What Cost?
• The Dead Zone: The Implicit Marginal Tax Rate
• Milton Friedman on the Negative Income Tax
• Sorry CNN and David Wheeler, But a "Basic Income" Wouldn't End Poverty

And for research, see:

• United States Senate Committee on the Budget
• Income and Poverty in the United States: 2015
• What Are the Poverty Thresholds Today?
• Number in Poverty and Poverty Rate: 1959 to 2015
• US Poverty Threshold
• Official Poverty Measure Masks Gains Made over Last 50 Years