Benefits Cliffs: Policy Shouldn’t Punish Promotion

Becoming poor is not an event. It is a process. Like a plane crash, poverty is rarely caused by one thing going wrong. Usually, it is a series of misfortunes—a job loss, then a car accident, then an eviction—that interact and compound...We often think of poverty in America as a pool, a fixed portion of the population that remains destitute for years. In fact...poverty is more like a lake, with streams flowing steadily in and out all the time. “The number of people in danger of becoming poor is far larger than the number of people who are actually poor.”

—Duke University professor Anirudh Krishna, [from Poor Millennials, by Michael Hobbes, HuffPost]