Editor's Note: The following piece appears in This Way Up: New Thinking About Poverty and Economic Mobility, a collection of essays published by the American Enterprise Institute. It is reprinted here with permission. I want to challenge us to think about American poverty in a new way. For decades now, the policy community has thought the problem with American poverty is that we haven't been able to help people enough. The government has spent $20 trillion since the mid 1960s trying to alleviate poverty by helping struggling people meet their material needs. And indeed, poverty has become more bearable in strictly material terms ...
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