Here in these United States, especially in an election season, we spend a lot of time talking about poverty. Now, the poor will always be with us, and a large part of the reason for that is behavior; poor people will keep doing the things that made them poor, while rich people will keep doing the things that made them rich. There are also life stage reasons; young people tend to have lower incomes and higher debt-income ratios than older people, because they are early on in their careers and haven't amassed any wealth. I can attest to that personally; while my wife and I are comfortable today, there was a time when we were young, when we lacked the most basic receptacle in which to conduct micturition or a proper place to defenestrate it.
Nevertheless it's a hot political issue. And here's the thing about poverty: Poverty in the United States is only relative poverty. There is no abject poverty in the United States. For abject poverty, you'll have to look at certain places in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia; you won't find it in any of the modern, industrialized nations of the First World. "Poor" people in the United States have smartphones, cable televisions, air conditioning; the most prevalent health issue among the American poor is obesity.
And that's a key difference. Abject poverty means a lack of access to the most basic human needs. It means hunger; not the "end of the day, I've been busy and haven't had the chance to grab a sandwich" kind of hunger, but the kind of near-starvation where one's belly button is rubbing up against one's backbone. We have none of that in the United States, except in cases of cruelty and abuse. No, all our "poverty" is relative, and we have the most prosperous poor people in human history; poor people here in the USA today live a lifestyle far safer and healthier than the richest people on the planet 200 years ago. And the most recent Census report on poverty, for 2025, shows a drop even in that relative poverty measure.
- In 2025, the official poverty rate fell 0.5 percentage points to 10.2 percent. There were 34.5 million people in poverty in 2025 (Figure 2 and Tables 1 and 2).
- The official poverty rate for children fell to a historic low of 13.4 percent in 2025 (Figure 2 and Tables 1 and 2).
- Between 2024 and 2025, the official poverty rate for Hispanic individuals decreased to a historic low of 13.9 percent (Figure 2 and Table 3).
That doesn't stop the Left from squawking about poverty, of course. And here's the thing about the left: Whereas the Right tends to view poverty as an absolute, the left tends to view poverty through the lens of "inequality." That's a load of corral litter; here's why and I'm going to tell you. A recent piece at City Journal by Chris Pope has some interesting insights.
Some sociologists have argued that economic growth causes workers to “develop new needs,” which are not necessarily reflected in a fixed poverty metric. For example, though industrialization pushes up wages, people must incur additional expenditures to obtain them—to get to these jobs, for example, workers must live in costlier urban areas and incur substantial commuting expenses. The price of some basic goods, such as housing, education, and health care, also tend to rise with others’ willingness to pay for them.
Because of these deficiencies, scholars have sometimes argued that poverty should be thought of as not absolute but relative—“a matter of falling behind the prevailing standards of one’s contemporary society,” as University of Southern California professor David Brady puts it. Following this line of thinking, the OECD defines poverty as an income less than half of a country’s median.
That's not what poverty is. That's a relative measure of income level; but, as noted, there is no abject poverty in the United States. And, as Mr. Pope points out, even relative poverty depends on whose metrics you use and how you fiddle with them.
Many studies of welfare states have embraced this definition of “relative poverty,” as if inequality and poverty were synonymous. Citing such metrics, Brady argues that poverty rates are “staggeringly high” in the United States. The political utility of such arguments should be obvious.
But relative poverty statistics are at odds with common sense. In 2022, median household income in Mexico was about $16,000, compared with about $59,000 in the United States. Only 17 percent of Americans lived in households with disposable incomes less than $20,000 in 2024, compared with 93 percent of Mexicans. Yet according to the OECD’s relative definition, the share of Mexico’s population in poverty in 2022 (15 percent) was lower than that in the United States (18 percent).
So, as we see here, the application of relative poverty rates depends a great deal on who is doing the calculating. That's not a good way to conduct public policy.
That brings us back to poverty, to relative wealth inequality, and this election year. Again, there is effectively no abject poverty in the United States. If we want to deal with even relative poverty, we have to quit worrying about number-crunching and start thinking about incentives. Work and independence should be the goal; not an ever-increasing stream of government benefits. A wealthy society like the United States should not tolerate abject poverty; we're not savages, after all. But neither should we incentivize indolence, and that's what our welfare systems have been doing since the Johnson Administration and the "War on Poverty," which we seem to be losing, as we still have relative poverty. Now we are at the point where we have families who have been on the dole for two, three, four generations, and that's what has to stop. The worrying about income inequality has to stop, as well; it's a waste of time, as we can't make poor people prosperous by making prosperous people poor. But perhaps, if we are to get the welfare state under some semblance of control, and get lower-income people back to work, we have to make being on that dole just a little less comfortable, with work requirements and strict limits on what can and can't be done with those benefits.
The poor, as the old saying goes, will always be with us. At present we have no abject poverty, and that's what our welfare systems should be aimed at; that, and nothing more. A safety net, not a hammock. Bear that in mind when you listen to this year's campaign ads; see which party's candidates are favoring which solutions.
