ABSTRACT
Despite the enormous wealth in the United States there are approximately 47 million Americans or nearly 16% of the population who are defined by the government as poor. In a country of 310 million people that means one in eight Americans lives in poverty and almost 13 million children grow up in poverty. When compared with other advanced industrial democracies,
the United States has not been successful, despite numerous programs, at reducing poverty and moving the poor into the mainstream of American economic life. As Isabel Sawhill, a noted poverty expert at the Brookings Institution has stated, “Despite our wealth . . . poverty is more prevalent in the United States than in most of the rest of the industrialized world. It is also more prevalent now than it was in the early seventies, when the incidence of poverty of America reached a post-war low.”1
