This is not an article but our request for your help. However, we are not interested in your money but in something more valuable – your time.
We are looking for information that will help us move forward and – as we believe – even closer to a functional solution to our common problems. If you find the answer to this question, we will be grateful if you write this information, including the source, in the comments below or send it to our email helpus@piqaso.com.
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PIQASO team
Why do we ask this question?
People and families are considered poor when they lack the economic resources necessary to experience a minimal living standard. Poverty in the United States of America refers to people who lack sufficient income or material possessions for their needs. In the U.S., the “poverty threshold” is a level of income below which an individual or family cannot afford the basic necessities of life. For example, in 2021, a family of four living in the contiguous 48 states is considered to be in poverty if its annual income falls below $26,500.
A sobering report from the Urban Institute projects poverty levels in the U.S. will sit at 7.7% through the end of 2021, down from 13.9% in 2018. The decline can be attributed to a suite of policies, including stimulus checks, enhanced unemployment insurance payments and eligibility, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) payments and refundable child tax credits. The impact of these various programs was especially pronounced among children. In 2018, government programs kept the rate of poverty among Americans under the age of 18 at 14.2% rather than the 26.9% rate that would have been the case without government assistance. But in 2021, a year when 30.1% of children would have been living in poverty without government assistance, the addition of pandemic-related relief to normal assistance programs drove the child poverty rate down to 5.6%.
Although the US is a relatively wealthy country by international standards, poverty has consistently been present throughout the United States, along with efforts to alleviate it, from New Deal-era legislation during the Great Depression to the national War on Poverty in the 1960s to poverty alleviation efforts during the 2008 Great Recession.
