Abstract
A major difficulty in evaluating the effectiveness of our antipoverty program stems from the inadequacy of the poverty statistics used in making program evaluations. It is now recognized that the official poverty series published in the Bureau of the CensusCurrent Population Reports significantly overstates the number of persons who are poor because it records only the money income of households. By ignoring the value of in-kind transfers, the census poverty figures fail to register the antipoverty effect of more than 60% of the income-tested transfer budget. Hence our multibillion dollar in-kind programs such as Food Stamps, Medicaid, public housing, rent supplements, and many other noncash welfare programs are assumed to have no value for low-income families.
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© 1982 Kluwer Nijhoff Publishing
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Paglin, M. (1982). How Effective is our Multiple-Benefit Antipoverty Program?. In: Sommers, P.M. (eds) Welfare Reform in America. Middlebury Conference Series on Economic Issues. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-7389-3_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-7389-3_5
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