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JOHN KARL SCHOLZ; KARA LEVINE
Understanding Poverty, 06/2009Book Chapter
This chapter documents the evolution of antipoverty programs in the United States, focusing particularly on the 1990s.¹ Antipoverty programs are designed to mitigate the most pernicious aspects of market-based economic outcomes—unemployment and low earnings. These programs make up society’s “safety net,” and each has different eligibility standards and benefit formulas. Although they can be aggregated and categorized to summarize trends in coverage and generosity, a consequence of their patchwork nature is that the safety net may appear very different to a family in one set of circumstances than it does to a family in another. Thus, we strike a
