As with health centres, schools in rural areas are disproportionately affected by energy poverty, notes the report.
"When we start dealing with poverty," notes Lodal, "we turn off our brains about what has worked over time for the middle and upper classes in America".
Sachs, who wrote a book titled "The End of Poverty," notes that American society doesn't care about poor people in other countries.
"Fifty-two percent of fast-food workers in America earn wages that are below the poverty line," notes Prof Taparia, and even President Obama has called for an increase to the minimum wage to reduce exacerbating income inequality.
He said the government had been trying to reduce poverty, noting that a program of giving small cash stipends to people in extreme poverty, begun in 2005, now included more than 75,000 families.
David Roodman and Jonathan Morduch question the statistical validity of studies of microcredit's effects on poverty, noting the complexity of the situations involved.
Solis has said to push U.S. leaders on poverty, noting that cutting rates in poverty in half was almost achieved following President Lyndon Johnson's launch of the "War on Poverty" nearly half a century ago.
But Yunus, who has worked tirelessly to eradicate poverty, noted that many tend to conflate success with money, which could be hurting their health and happiness -- and which may not support global sustainability.
The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty noted in a press release that the United States' "response marks the first time that the Administration has acknowledged that homelessness in the U.S. implicates its human rights obligations".
Investing in development "While the economic story may be positive by GDP averages, behind the averages one in four children is living in extreme poverty," noted UNICEF Regional Communication Advisor Lynn Geldof.
Even within the straitjacket of this narrow methodology, he carefully observed the paradoxes of child poverty, noting that "the poverty period, with its accompaniments of under-feeding, scanty clothing, and overcrowding, lasts during the first ten or more years of their lives, a circumstance which cannot fail to arrest their mental and physical development" (Rowntree 1902 128n).
