Calculating full cost of poverty difficult to do
Print
Email
Save
Reprints
Twitter
Share
Del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Reddit
Calculating the full cost of poverty is hard to do.
Direct costs include government spending on food stamps, public housing and health care. Indirect costs include prison funding, lost taxes and higher private insurance premiums.
Reducing poverty would increase prosperity for everyone, not just the poor, according to one report.
“Investing in the eradication of poverty in America would increase the resources of each American household by an average of more than $18,000 a year, equivalent to a wage increase of more than 30 percent,” said the authors of “The Economics of Poverty: How Investments to Eliminate Poverty Benefit All Americans.”
The report was done for Entergy Corp., which provides electricity to much of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. Entergy hired economists to prepare a business plan with a “cost-benefit analysis” for addressing poverty. The report notes one “cost” not often considered by the public — the unbuilt roads, bridges and other infrastructure that could be constructed with the money poverty costs government and society as a whole.
Click "Report Abuse" to notify our moderators that a comment may contain objectionable content.
Your comment appears to contain objectionable content and must be reviewed by a site moderator. If your comment is deemed objectionable, it will not appear on the site.
 | ||||
| Most Popular | Most Emailed | Hot Topics | ||
