Thanks to Bill Clinton’s welfare reform, there has been a large increase in the number of people living in what the sociologists call “extreme poverty,” meaning living on less than two dollars per day. Studies of people in merely “deep poverty,” meaning at a level half the official poverty line, noted that this particular stratum of the wretched reached its all-time high point in the years just after the Great Recession. The number of people on food stamps in 2014 was double what it had been in 1997.13
