The United States needs a set of goals that are similar in ambition to the Millennium Development Goals but make sense given our starting conditions.
Overcoming poverty requires both more personal responsibility and broader societal responsibility, both better choices by individuals and better policies and investments by government.The United States has one of the highest poverty rates among industrialized countries, and U.S. government spending on anti-poverty programming as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product is one of the lowest among industrialized countries.
The United States must develop a strategy that both helps those who are poor get out of poverty and eliminates conditions that allow poverty to maintain its stranglehold on communities.
