ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on terms such as 'poor' and 'poverty' to refer to individuals, and 'low-income' to refer to communities. 'Low-income communities' implies a call to fairly specific and focused action: to raise the incomes of the community's residents, as well as increase the tax revenues of the community's coffers. In order to survive and thrive, every community must have some form of industry that brings in money from outside the community, which is the fundamental assumption of economic base theory. The Census Bureau's poverty income threshold figures are updated versions of calculations and assumptions made in the 1960s, so not surprisingly those thresholds have been criticized as simplistic, outdated, and overly narrow in scope. The UN 'Inequality-Adjusted Human Development Index', embraces concern with the equity of income levels and other indicators of human well-being, not simply with absolute levels in terms of a 'poverty line' or some other indicator.
