level at only 8.5%. As you can see by the great differences in these two percentages,families headed by a male are much less likely to by in poverty than families headed by afemale.Location also plays a major role in the poverty level scales in America. Poverty levelsin the central city are at 18.5% and outside the city poverty levels are at 14.4%. Thesepercentages are so close together because rural areas bring the second number up. People who live in rural areas don’t make much more money than the people in the innercities do. Most people don’t know this but it is true. the people from the suburbs haveto bring the poverty levels down for the people outside the city category. All in all, the poverty rates in America have gone from 13.3% in 1999 to 12.7% in2000. This is a great difference and hopefully the number will keep on decreasing sothere will be less poverty in the united States. Right now the number is 34.5 millionpeople in poverty, so it will be hard to eliminate poverty completely, especially when youtake into consideration the fact that the number of people in emergency shelters in NewYork City has gone from 1000 families in 1980, to 10,000 families in the year 2000. Hopefully we can get that number back closer to 1000 families. There are many challenges faced by poor people. The biggest challenges are tosurvive and to do so by staying healthy, maintaining a job and basic materials, and toavoid insecure places. Other challenges they face are to put theirs lives back together sothat they can get out of poverty and move on. This will also save them some humiliationand the rest of their kids lives. Many measures have to be taken to attack and thus limit the spread of poverty. One major one is that the minimum wage, as mentioned before, should be raised frombelow $6 an hour to as close to $12 an hour as possible because $12 is the amount thatthe NLIHC came up with as the lowest amount that you could...
