The federal government now considers a family of four in New York City to be poor if its pre-tax income is below $37,900.Even with full medical coverage. The calculation helps explain why newly revised Census Bureau figures hike the number of poor Americans to 49 million as of last year, further widening an already yawning gap between ordinary perceptions of poverty…

Editor's note: The following Q&A with Robert Rector appeared on The Star Ledger's op-ed page. We tell kids not to drop out of school because they’ll be trapped in a life of poverty — but say nothing about other crucial choices, such as marriage. Is that a mistake? Liberals argue the solution to poverty lies in better schools and jobs, and more access…

Welfare spending has hit a stunning, all-time high. A new Congressional Research Service report confirms what research here at The Heritage Foundation has shown: The government’s means-tested welfare programs now cost taxpayers roughly $1 trillion a year. (This figure does not include either Social Security or Medicare.) Unlike general government programs,…

The continuing collapse of marriage in America, along with a dramatic rise in births to single women, is the most important cause of childhood poverty. In Kansas, for example, seven of every 10 poor families with children are headed by a single parent – most of them mothers. Only 5.5 percent of married couples with children in Kansas were poor in 2009, compared with…

Liberals in the House of Representatives voted unsuccessfully to jettison the federal work requirements established in the 1996 welfare reform law. Even worse, as the losing side of the 250-164 vote late Thursday, they actually voted to increase the national debt to accomplish this. Here’s the background.  In 1996, Congress passed the popular welfare reform law that…

The work requirements underpinning the nation’s largest cash-assistance welfare program no longer are legally binding on state governments. They can and will be replaced by alternative rules devised unilaterally by federal bureaucrats. That, anyway, is what President Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has declared — 16 years after the previous…

A few days ago, we learned an alarming fact from the U.S. Census Bureau: 46.2 million Americans are poor, a record high that’s unchanged since 2010. Some say the dismayingly high poverty rate, stuck at 15%, is just the latest sign of a weak economic recovery from a recession that created high unemployment. Clearly there is some truth to that, even though the Census…