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The article emphasizes the poor method of measuring poverty in the U.S., citing 1992 data from the Census Bureau. The Census Bureau estimates that 14.5 per cent of the U.S. population lived in poverty in 1992. Since 1980, the rate of poverty in the U.S. has hovered around 14 per cent. In reality, the nation is doing a good job at addressing the problem, but by definition virtually all of the efforts are excluded from the data because poverty is measured on the basis of pre-tax money income, excluding capital gains. In addition, the data also exclude a big share of the government's efforts to ease poverty. The Census Bureau takes into account only cash grants and excluding Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, school lunches and rent subsidies. By including such items, the poverty rate can be reduced from 14.5 per cent to 11.7 per cent.

The article criticizes the plan of Democratic presidential candidate Bill Bradley to reduce poverty in the U.S. Bradley's plan for poverty reduction is nothing but an ill-advised call to increase the minimum wage of the parents of poor children and consequently raise the bar for a government subsidy of $14 billion. But these two measures would not solve the cause of poverty, the single parenthood. Based on statistics, children born to a single parent are most likely to be poor that those with two parents.