His seven years in the Illinois State Senate aren't heavily scrutinized, but he scored significant achievements there: a law to videotape police interrogations in capital cases; an earned income tax credit to fight poverty; an expansion of early-childhood education.
Rapid growth in China and India has pulled hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, sustained expansion has spread from Asia, where rapid catch-up has a long history, to South America, where halting growth and economic retrenchments were more the norm.
Agricultural Expansion, Poverty Reduction, and Environment in the Tropical Forests".
Few, if any, major improvements in recent decades — the spread of democracy, say, or the halving of extreme poverty, or the expansion of women's and L.G.B.T. rights — can be attributed to utopianism.
And with unemployment at record lows and the economy enjoying its longest post-war expansion, poverty and labour rights are not the hot issues they once were.But there is one strong theme that seems to unify many of the protesters.
Mixed in with that is the uncertain economic climate, leading to an explosion of unemployment, poverty and the expansion of folks who are left with nothing to lose.
The first would be expanding Medicaid to the poverty level ("partial expansion" in the chart below), which is $11,490 for an individual this year, and the second would be to allow people who earn below poverty to access tax credits for private health insurance ("expanded subsidies").
It was not a coincidence that some of the signature programs of the Great Society -- Medicare, Medicaid, the War on Poverty, and the expansion of Social Security -- were enacted at a time when three in four Americans believed that you could "trust the government in Washington to do what is right all or most of the time".
If these trends were driving the results, then defining the control group as a mix of low-poverty counties in an expansion state and high-poverty counties in a comparison state would confound the results.
This country will need something far greater than today's puny efforts in economic development, or failed "trickle-down" policies of the past, if we are to prevent the expansion of poverty to include those who have worked all their lives.
