Poverty Threshold 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.

My mother saved our home with a minimum wage job. But in the 1960s, a minimum wage job would support a family of three above the poverty line. Not today. Not even close. I understood right then that people can work hard, they can play by the rules, and they can still take a hard smack.

I've been working on issues of poverty for more than 20 years, and so it's ironic that the problem that and question that I most grapple with is how you actually define poverty. What does it mean?

Full-time workers earning the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 only earn about $14,500 a year in wages - below the poverty line for a family of two. That's unacceptable.

Unless they have disabilities to cope with, no family should get more from living on benefits than the average family gets from going out to work. No more open-ended chequebook.

The international community... allows nearly 3 billion people - almost half of all humanity - to subsist on $2 or less a day in a world of unprecedented wealth.

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 poverty line in the U.S., for example, has nothing to do with the poverty line in India. It is a relative poverty line. It is reset from time to time but it is related to U.S. median income, so if I set that to be the absolute poverty line everyone in India would essentially be poor.

It is shameful that millions of Americans are suffering the economic injustice of working a full-time job and earning a wage that leaves them below the poverty line.

Inflation is taking up the poverty line, and poverty is not just economic but defined by way of health and education.

While easy to understand, the income-based poverty line has limitations. Specifically, the median monthly household income measures only income without considering assets.

Given the relativity concept, poverty cannot be eliminated. Indeed, an economic upturn with a broad improvement in household income does not guarantee a decrease in the size of the poor population, especially when the income growth of households below the poverty line is less promising than the overall.

At the current $5.15 an hour, the federal minimum wage has become a poverty wage. A full-time worker with one child lives below the official poverty line.

I've still got family members living below the poverty line in New York.

There is no good way of measuring poverty.

The poverty line understates the true amount of poverty because it measures it as three times the breadbasket that a family needs, but it doesn't consider all the other things that are inflating far, far faster than food prices.

I lived below the official American poverty line until I was 31.

I have always paid income tax. I object only when it reaches a stage when I am threatened with having nothing left for my old age - which is due to start next Tuesday or Wednesday.

I think in some ways it would make more sense to have as a poverty level a relative concept and say, the level of poverty is that level of income or that level of consumption below which 10 percent of the people now are.

I made a decision that whether or not I was going to make under the national poverty level wasn't going to play a part in whether or not I was an actor. That's what I do.

We decided in the mid-1960s that all poor people are the same: they are all poor. We know they're poor because we have defined a poverty line, and they're all underneath it.

What is a normal childhood? We weren't rich, we were pretty middle-class. My dad survived from job to job; with him taking care of so many relatives, he couldn't save any money.

You never can cure poverty. Poverty is in the eye of the beholder.

Like navigation markings in unknown waters, definitions of poverty need to be distinctive and unambiguous. A definition that is not precise is as bad as no definition at all.

The poverty line is like the age of consent: if you find yourself parsing exactly where it is, you’ve probably already done something very, very wrong.