The Alleviation of Poverty: How Far Have We Come?

The first section of this report provides a critical discussion of how far the nation has come in the nearly 50 years since Johnson’s famous commitment to end poverty. The next section presents benchmark trends in income poverty using the official poverty measure. Section three examines the economic, social and policy factors that have driven trends in poverty since 1964. Section four briefly discusses the prospects for alleviating poverty during the next decade. The final section discusses policy options for raising earnings among low-skill workers, improving the antipoverty impact of the safety net, and reducing the share of families at high risk of being poor.
http://evans.washington.edu/files/EvansWorkingPaper-2011-02.pdf