into society as a wholeùthis means not having access to normal things that make up a good societyùlegal services, health care, transportation, etc, things most Americans take for granted on a daily basis who are subject to impoverished conditions.
According to the Economic Report of the President, there are three major ways of measuring a country's wealth or lack thereof: 1) Gross National Product (GNP) is the annual total value of all goods produced and services provided in a country, 2) Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the same, excluding deals with other countries, and 3) Human Poverty Index (HPI,) which does not use money as the only factor, it also takes into consideration education, length of life and living standards (32-35). One of the most heartbreaking facts today is that none of our programs have mitigated the statistics in the one group of innocent poverty bystandersùchildren.
Nearly half of all poor people are children (Congressional Quarterly). One of every four American children under the age of six and to go even further, one of every two African American children under six is poor (Kilty and Segal, 58). These are egregious facts that weigh heavily on the hearts of our nation's parents, families, and, our nation's capitol. Even worse, 43% of all poor people are living in "deep" poverty with income below half the poverty line, about $7,500 for a family of three (Waller, 1). Even so, many poverty reports released can't perfectly measure the true depth of the real problems. A question worth asking is, where are these impoverished families support systems or where are their families that raised them? Is there no income anywhere to get them out of a rut even if it were only temporarily?
It would appear that poverty, or the deep kind of poverty mentioned in this paper has many causes, many levels of analysis and cannot possibly be covered in a few pages. However, one analysis may be observed, poverty m...