?There is widespread disagreement on what poverty is, what the best measure is, and what the immense quantity of data we have on poverty means. Poverty in the United States today has many faces and is difficult to define. There’s the middle-aged man on a city street holding up a sign begging for his next meal. There’s the face of a young child in a school somewhere, whose only real meal today will be a free school lunch. There’s the sad face of a single mother who doesn’t have enough money to buy clothes for her children. And there’s the frustrated face of a man working at a minimum-wage job who can't afford to pay rent. According to the Census Bureau poverty is defined as a state or condition in which a person or community lacks the financial resources and essentials to enjoy a minimum standard of life and well-being that's considered acceptable in society. There are two common measure of poverty in the United States. One is a poverty threshold based on income levels, set by the Department of Health and Human Services.  Another is the poverty line which is a measurement based on a minimum amount required to support an average family of given composition at the lowest level consistent with standards of living prevailing in US. The War on Poverty is the name for the legislation first introduced by United States President Lyndon B. Johnson during his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964. This legislation was proposed by Johnson in response to a national poverty rate of around nineteen percent. The speech led the United States Congress to pass the Economic Opportunity Act, which established the Office of Economic Opportunity to administer the local application of federal funds targeted against poverty. This is where the first evidence of the poverty line lays. In the decade following the 1964 introduction of the war on poverty, poverty rates in the U.S. dropped to their lowest level since records began in 1958, from 17.3% in the year the Economic Opportunity Act was implemented to 11.1% in 1973. They have remained between 11 and 15.2% ever since. (Kenny, P.1) This stagnant rate raises the question of the effectiveness of government policies. In the past, we have seen the War on Poverty to have had some effect on increasing the well being of American citizens. Now that the poverty rates are neither rising nor falling substantially, we must conclude that government policies presently in effect, are no longer promoting growth. They simply create a safety net formed by massive government spending. It is hard to grant the war on poverty a success because Republicans and Democrats have different definitions to poverty but one cannot simply state that it is a failure. A new Columbia University study indicates that the safety net programs established as part of the War on Poverty have saved millions of Americans from falling into poverty over the past four decades. (Hoynes 2006 ) In an attempt to find a reasonable solution for poverty, one must first try and find a significant cause of poverty. Myths surrounding the cause of poverty in the U.S. are held by a large portion of Americans, including a small number of scholars. There are those who believe that mental illness or chemical addictions are a cause of poverty. In some cases this is true, but often these problems are a direct result of poverty rather than the cause. Another myth about the cause of poverty is biology/intelligence. Consistently, studies have disproved the Darwinist theories, which claim that the poor are genetically unfit people, possessing characteristics such as laziness, dishonesty