- Growth has been good for decades. So why hasn’t poverty declined? By Neil Irwin, June 4, 2014, New York Times: The surest way to fight poverty is to achieve stronger economic growth. That, anyway, is a view embedded in the thinking of a lot of politicians and economists. ‘The federal government,’ Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, wrote in The Wall Street Journal, ‘needs to remember that the best anti-poverty program is economic growth,’ which is not so different from the argument put forth by John F. Kennedy (in a somewhat different context) that ‘a rising tide lifts all boats.’ In Kennedy’s era, that had the benefit of being true. From 1959 to 1973, the nation’s economy per person grew 82 percent, and that was enough to drive the proportion of the poor population from 22 percent to 11 percent. . .”
- Income inequality is not the biggest economic threat to women, By Joanne Weiner, June 4, 2014, Washington Post: “How do we get rid of income inequality and poverty? One rather obvious way, according to the Economic Policy Institute, is to pay people more. ‘Raising wages is the central economic challenge of our time—essential to addressing income inequality, boosting living standards for the broad middle-class, reducing poverty, and sustaining economic growth,’ according to the briefing paper announcing the ‘Raising America’s Pay’ initiative that the EPI is launching Wednesday. Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez is scheduled to deliver the keynote address at EPI’s Washington offices. . .”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty