Qualitative and quantitative measures of poverty are intended to end or help ameliorate poverty. In the case of housing, for example, governments in the United States have determined that the normative standard for affordability is that a household should spend no more and no less than 30 percent of it’s gross monthly income on housing costs – any more and that household is cost burdened, and any less the household is paying too little, taking up a unit that could be lived in by a household earning less money.

Monthly unemployment figures have long been the barometer of America’s economic health. Unfortunately, they fail to tell the real story of the economic pressures experienced by American families, conditions that are rife with employment insecurity that constrict and ultimately threaten the American dream.

The U.S. unemployment rate is 4.8 percent. It was 9.3 percent when President Obama took office just over eight years ago. Many news and political analysts have wondered why so many Americans have sounded so angry and despondent when they talk about the economy. The stock market is up, too. Some economists say 4.8 percent is close to full employment.

Peter Cove’s new book, “Poor No More: Rethinking Dependency and the War on Poverty,” offers a plan to scrap traditional welfare and cash assistance programs. Instead, Cove suggests restructuring anti-poverty programs to prioritize jobs above all else.

Beginning this summer, some Americans who receive food assistance will have a new way to feed their families. The Agriculture Department said that it will test a program that allows people on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — SNAP, known as food stamps — to order groceries online through various retailers. The ability to shop online could bring healthful food into food deserts, low-income areas where fresh food is not readily available.

While the growing divide between “coastal elites” and Middle America has been a hot topic in recent months, many mayors from red and blue states have strikingly similar policy priorities, according to a survey released Tuesday by the Boston University Initiative on Cities.

The city of Tampa has committed an avoidable legal, moral and public relations miscue with its arrests of volunteers feeding the homeless in a downtown park. The permitting requirements need to be changed, the police need to move on to bigger things and the volunteers need to assess whether this is really the most effective way to help people in need. This is a fixable problem if all sides focus less on winning and more on the larger issue of civic service.

During Mayor Bill de Blasio’s first year in office, the Department of Homeless Services created 16 new shelters across New York City to house more than a thousand families and hundreds of single adults. Then, for eight months, the city stopped opening shelters. With the number of people falling into homelessness still rising and with shelter beds running short, the city instead turned to what was supposed to be a stopgap: hotels.

The United States is one of the richest countries in the world. It is also one of the most unequal. As a report released today shows, the U.S. ranks 23 out of 30 developed nations in a measure known as the “inclusive development index,” which factors in data on income, health, poverty, and sustainability. The index comes from the World Economic Forum, whose annual summit is taking place in Davos this week. It is a rather comprehensive measure of inequality, and the fact that the U.S. ranks so poorly is a sign of the country’s dramatic wealth concentration.

Even though homelessness in America’s cities continues to decline, food banks and pantries are still being stretched thin as the number of people seeking emergency food assistance climbs, according to a survey of mayors from 38 of the nation’s cities. The number of people seeking emergency food assistance increased by an average of 2% in 2016, the United States Conference of Mayors said in its annual report Wednesday.