Four decades after President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty in 1964 it remains a compelling need in America. The US Census Bureau still measures poverty in great detail, and the total number of people living in poverty during each of the past 40 years has remained high. After billions of dollars have been spent to aid impoverished Americans, more than 35 million are still without adequate income.

Conventional wisdom describes the “poor” as a large and persistent group of families and individuals left out of the economic success of America. Enduring debilitating poverty, the poor are entitled to political advocates, specially funded programmes and government bureaucracies to coordinate benefits.

Fortunately for America, the basic description of the poor is wrong. And therefore public policy based upon an aggregate view of poverty is inherently misinformed. A closer look at the facts shows a different picture. The Census Bureau and other researchers have been studying people and their families as they enter poverty, cope with the difficult challenges of poverty, and rise out of poverty as successful wage earners.

There are two basic areas of knowledge that offer the greatest illumination to our understanding of poverty in America: The dynamics of poverty — how people enter poverty and exit poverty and how long people remain in poverty; and the trigger points that cause people to become poor and the additional trigger points that enable people to rise out of poverty.

The basic facts are that while millions of people enter poverty (primarily because of a loss of a job or a family break-up) each year, most people remain poor for less than five months, and millions of people re-enter the labour force and earn enough to rise above poverty. For two-thirds of people in poverty the transition in and out of poverty is relatively quick. For others, like single parents and the elderly, poverty is persistent for a number of years.

Every five years during the past three decades, between 30 million and 40 million Americans have risen out of poverty. This is an enormous accomplishment for the individuals, their families, and the caring society that has supported them. Unfortunately, every five years during the past three decades almost as many people have entered poverty for one or more reasons. But unlike most other developed nations, poverty in America is a transitional process — from acceptable income levels into poverty and back to acceptable income again.

To accelerate the transition out of poverty, government agencies need to qualify applicants and deliver services within weeks of entering poverty or the public expenditures will be largely irrelevant. Long-term support issues of housing, training and education may be important to the one-third chronically poor, but not to the two-thirds in transit through poverty.

The war on poverty needs to be fought on two fronts. First is the quick response, transactional battle of month to month for those at the edge of poverty to sustain or regain employment and family stability — supporting most of the people and most cost-effective support because it leverages their own substantial family and financial momentum. The second is the chronic poor, where there is a different strategy of long-term support and gradual transition. — The Christian Science Monitor