are they poor? How much assistance do they receive? How can they be lifted out of poverty?
Almost 40 million Americans live below the poverty level as defined by the federal government. The federal government definitions of poverty are themselves extremely low. The poverty level for a single person is just $7,363 and up to only $29,529 for a family of nine or more. That means more than one of seven Americans are unable to feed, clothe and house their families adequately.
The demographics of welfare recipients and the poor in general are not entirely unreflective of the general population as a whole. There are some important differences. A statistic used by many critics to give some credence to Dan Quayle's assessment of the poor is that slightly more than half of those who fall below the poverty level are single-parent families headed by women (Bennett, 1995, pp. 23-24). In the general population as a whole, only 18 percent of single-parent families are headed by women. Just as many heads of poor h
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