Chronic Poverty In America

America the land of opportunity where you can live the American dream, but as great as this sounds it is the American “dream” for a reason, because the harsh reality is poverty. In 2010 poverty and welfare was a National Debate topic, what many do not realize is poverty can take many forms, currently 37 million Americans are living in poverty, and this number has been increasing since 2000 (“National Debate Topic”). In America, there several types of poverty, in order to combat poverty the government instituted the welfare system was put in place by temporarily assisting individuals with the hopes of getting these individual back to supporting themselves. Due to there being several different types of poverty, the welfare system is not effective in combating all types because of the varying degrees of severity and longevity of each types of poverty, and the amount and types of programs that are in place are not the most effective for all types. Life does not always go the one would like it to road bumps and unexpected situations always come up, examples of these unexpected situations are unemployment, medical crisis, death, and other unexpected situations. All of these situations, if

This conceptualization of the different causes of chronic and transient poverty implies different policy solutions for each type of poverty. For transient poverty, an appropriate policy intervention would therefore be insurance that provides short-term benefits to mitigate income fluctuations, while chronic poverty calls for policies that either provide long-term sustained income assistance or help individuals build their human or financial assets.”