ABSTRACT
The United States (U.S.) boasts one of the highest per capita incomes in the world. Yet it leads other industrialized nations with the highest poverty rate. In 2000, Smeeding, Rainwater, and Burtless compared poverty rates across 18 developed nations using three different poverty measures. Their results showed that the U.S. poverty rate was considerably higher than all 17 of the other nations. More recently, Smeeding (2006) ranked 11 wealthy nations and again the United States scored first or second on nearly all poverty measures. In addition to noting that poverty among the elderly was particularly high in comparison to other wealthy nations, Smeeding (2006, p. 86) expressed special concern over U.S. child and family poverty:
In most rich countries, the relative child poverty rate is 10 percent or less; in the United States, it is 21.9 percent. What seems most distinctive about the American poor, especially poor American single parents, is that they work more hours than do the resident parents of other nations while also receiving less in transfer benefits than in other countries.
