Four decades after President Lyndon Johnson called for a "War on Poverty," poverty remains a major social issue in the United States. Taken as a whole, the United States is one of the world's wealthiest large countries, and undoubtedly even many Americans whom we would regard as poor live better than hundreds of millions of people in the world's poor nations. However, the US has a poverty rate that is strikingly high by the standards of its peer group, the advanced industrial countries. According to official government figures, some 11 percent of Americans live in poverty, and many experts consider the real poverty rate to be higher (Montiero and Silva, n.d., pp. 3-4).
In American popular culture and public discourse, poverty and "welfare" are commonly associated with absence of a work ethic (Handler, 1997, pp. 293-94). In addition, poverty is widely associated with a disrupted family structure. Both of these assertions, for example, are found conjoined in a publication by the conservative Heritage Foundation: "There are two main reasons that American children are poor; their parents don't work much, and fathers are absent from the home" (Rector and Johnson, 2004, p. 4).
These believes carry strong overtones of moral judgment; in effect the poor are condemned as lazy and shiftless, and immoral to boot. In fact, however, a large proportion of the adult poor do work, not infrequently at two jobs (Montiero and Silva, n.d., p. 4). Indeed, "most welfare recipients are indistinguishable from the low-wage workers -- the working poor" (Handler, 1997, p. 303). They are poor because the work available to them does not pay enough to sustain them at anything like the standard of living associated with the middle class and the "American way of life."
Even critics who make this point also acknowlege, however, that many of the poor are ill-equipped to pursue opportunities that might othe
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