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(THE CONVERSATION) On Sept. 12, the U.S. Census Bureau released national poverty data for 2017.

The headline was that 39.7 million people were poor in 2017. This works out to 12.3 percent of the population or one in eight Americans. The good news is that the U.S. poverty rate has fallen since 2010, when it hit 15.1 percent, and is now where it was before the Great Recession.

The bad news is that poverty still exceeds the 11.3 percent rate of 2000 and far too many people are poor in...