Poverty: United States and u. s. Census Bureau Essay

Submitted By cocksygen
Words: 329
Pages: 2

Poverty. A single word. It may or may not be a familiar phenomena to you, but it has been on a steady rise in the United States since the early 2000s. Even if the United States is one of the world's wealthiest nations, we still have a significant percentage of the population living in poverty. According to the U.S. Census Bureau in late 2012, more than 16% of the population (or over 40 million people) live in poverty, the highest it has been since 1993. Almost 16% of the population was living below the poverty line in 2010. But how do we define poverty? There are several ways it can be measured. Income, owned assets, and socioeconomic metrics, which include financial data, health, sanitation, mortality, and other characteristic of a person's well-being are a few of the universal ways to identify poverty. There are two types of poverty. Absolute poverty occurs when obtaining adequate resources to support themselves is obliterated. When people do not enjoy a minimum level of standard living as determined by their government is called Relative poverty, which is collectively increasing across the globe. Poverty has always been present, affecting most of the world's population today. There are many correlations to poverty in the United States. Family status, race, ethnicity, and age connect with rates of high poverty in some areas of the U.S.. Surprisingly, in 2013, child poverty reached extremely high levels; 16.7 million children live in homes that