Last year, 11.6% of people in the U.S. lived below the federal poverty level, a number that has ticked up in recent years, according to the Census Bureau. Experts say those numbers may be even higher ...

The idea of the poverty line dates back to 1963, when Mollie Orshansky, a statistician for the Social Security Administration, developed a method to measure how many families were unable to afford ...

Michael W. Green did some math recently. For a family of four to afford housing, health care, child care and other necessities, he calculated that they would need at least $136,500 a year. The U.S.