Poverty Level Quotes

These Americans are among the working poor with full-time jobs earning $5.15 an hour. Millions fall into this boat, even more when you consider that the poverty line has not been adequately adjusted to reflect the true level of poverty in this country.

People who go to work every day and perform the services essential to keeping our economy functioning deserve to live above the poverty level.

Everybody is entitled to solid living wages, which we don't hear from Hillary Clinton. She's quick to talk about parity, but parity at poverty, and that's not adequate.

If it is true that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, isn't it also true a society is only as healthy as its sickest citizen and only as wealthy as its most deprived?

We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won

I'm from Gary, Indiana, and everybody's damn near at the poverty level. It's a rough city to grow up in, and it's a modern-day ghost town.

I would say that many of the characters in my stories do not live in true poverty - they are not out on the street; they are not wondering if there will be anything to eat in the next week. They are people who are at the lower echelons of the economic strata.

If the Planning Commission said those who live above Rs 5,000 a month are not at poverty line, obviously there is something wrong with the definition of poverty in this country. How can anybody live at Rs 5,000?

The poorer is a family, the greater is the proportion of the total outgo which must be used for food... The proportion of the outgo used for food, other things being equal, is the best measure of the material standard of living of a population.

Our typical customer is a local guy who needs the money to get by for the week.

The way the law is written, people who are under 250 percent of poverty, who have a marketplace plan, also are eligible to have some of their deductible and co-pay expenses paid through cost-sharing. Insurance companies basically front the money and are reimbursed by the federal government, by HHS.

A third of all the children born today will be on welfare.

Perry’s Texas has created more minimum wage jobs … than any other state, and his super-rich state now has more families in poverty and without health coverage than any other.

The wealth of a society isn't measured at the top, but at the bottom

The cost of living is going up and the chance of living is going down.

I am furious at the way that we have allowed money to subvert our democracy. I am appalled at the way that the U.S., a very wealthy nation, permits and even encourages a level of poverty that other wealthy nations would not even consider.

I've never experienced chronic poverty, but I know what it's like to live on £3 a week.

It has now been over 7 years since Congress last raised the minimum wage to its current level of $5.15 per hour. Since that last increase, Congress's failure to adjust the wage for inflation has reduced the purchasing power of the minimum wage to record low levels.

Left unchecked, climate change risks not only making the poorest poorer, but pulling the emerging middle classes back into poverty, too.

Everything I do is going to be gangsta rap, street based, street oriented... I'm from Gary, Indiana, and everybody's damn near at the poverty level.

A lot of our sources for income-inequality measures come from household surveys in which people report how much they earned in the last year, how much income they have, and so on. Those are not as well funded as they should be. We need to have those numbers.

You judge a society by the decency of living of the weakest

Illiteracy at the poverty level (mainly a matter of bad grammar) does not alarm me nearly as much as the illiteracy of the well-to-do.

I never want to get to that level of poverty where taking a bath has to be a hot-pot experience.

We measure poverty by what I believe is a very, very crude concept. We actually measure poverty by trying to get some kind of an estimate of the minimum expenditures on food that are required to maintain health, multiplying that number by three, and saying that's the level of poverty. And it's a very crude, inaccurate arrangement.