Poverty and Government in America: A Historical Encyclopedia

摘要

Poverty is a big subject and an area of policy which affects every part of the USA. It is not much known about but impossible to hide. The poor suffer it, the middle class and the rich pay taxes to relieve it but at the same time they have always sought measures to contain and neutralise the poor. These measures started with indentured labour in the eighteenth century and the poorhouse in the nineteenth; then in the twentieth century this approach was softened by the New Deal and there was a frontal assault on poverty with Johnson's Great Society.