Danziger segment begins at 7:15

RSF president Sheldon Danziger recently appeared on the Tavis Smiley Show to discuss poverty and economic inequality in the United States for the fifth anniversary of Smiley’s Poverty Tour, which documents families struggling with poverty in the aftermath of the Great Recession. On the show, Danziger outlined some of the causes of persistent poverty, including stagnant wages and a political deadlock in Congress that has prevented the passage of new policies that could deliver aid to low-income families. And while the economy has slowly recovered from the recession, Danziger told Smiley, “The bottom 40% or 50% of Americans—many of whom work full-time, many of whom have two earners in their family—just have not benefited from the kinds of economic changes we’ve had over the last several decades.”

Danziger is the co-editor with Martha J. Bailey of the 2013 RSF book Legacies of the War on Poverty, which draws from fifty years of empirical evidence to offer an assessment of some of the policy successes of President Johnson’s War on Poverty. Read more about the book or purchase a copy here.