The State of Poverty in America We have two basic poverty
problems in the United States. One is the prevalence of low-wage
work. The other concerns those who have almost no work. The two
overlap. Most people who are poor work as much as they can and
go in and out of poverty. Fewer people have little or no work on
a continuing basis, but they are in much worse straits and tend
to stay poor from one generation to the next. The numbers in
both categories are stunning. Low-wage work encompasses people
with incomes below twice the poverty line—not poor but
struggling all the time to make ends meet. They now total 103
million, which means that fully one-third of the population has
an income below what would be $36,000 for a family of three. In
the bottom tier are 20.5 million people—6.7 percent of the
population—who are in deep poverty, with an income less than
half the poverty line (below $9,000 for a family of three). Some
6 million people out of those 20.5 million have no income at all
other than food stamps. Th