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Informative Essay: Do Government Programs Help The Poor

477 Words2 Pages

Since the 1960’s, it has been debated as to whether or not the impoverished are being helped or not. There are two examples that have been proven controversial to this issue: government programs and welfare, or public aid, in particular. Do they help the poor or do they not? Those who believe that government programs help the poor take the source of the U.S. Census and claim that government programs have cut the poverty line in half over the years. Those who argue that government programs do not help the poor tend to argue that government programs give incentives for lazy or bad behavior and that those who volunteer to help the poor have a better chance to change the lives of the poor than a fixed government plan. When it comes to welfare, …show more content…

Wendell Primus, the director of the income security division of the CBPP (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities), and Kathryn Porter, a senior research analyst, wrote a study on this issue called Government Programs Cut Poverty in Half, Analysis Finds. Through their expertise, they discuss why and how government programs have helped the poor in the 1990’s, a period of our time where poverty was especially prevalent in our country. The CBPP reported that with an absence of Social Security on our country in the year of 1996, one in every two elderly people would have fallen below the poverty line. However, with social security into play, fewer than one in every ten elderly people were poor that year. Also, the Census data showed that social security cut down the rate of elderly people living in poverty “from about 50 percent to 12 percent and [lifted] 12 million people out of poverty (Primus 117). This study also used Census data to show the population of Americans with an income below the poverty line before government benefit programs came out and then compared it to the population after the programs came out. In the year 1996, he study found “57.5 million people – 21.6 percent of the U.S. population – had incomes below the poverty before the receipt of government benefits. After government benefits [were] taken into account, the number remaining in poverty was reduced to

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