“A combination of joblessness due to the Great Recession and welfare reform meant to encourage work has led to more than a doubling of “extreme” poverty in the United States, a new study has found.
Using a World Bank definition usually applied to developing countries, the National Poverty Center found that the number of households getting by on less than $2 per person, per day increased to 1.46 million households in 2011 from 636,000 in 1996, a climb of more than 129 percent.
Welfare reform in the late 1990s eliminated the sole cash entitlement program for poor families with children, replacing it with time-limited cash assistance that required able-bodied people to seek work. Children were the hardest hit: The tapering off of assistance has doubled the numbers of children in extreme poverty households, to 2.81 million from 1.38 million….”
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