This book deals with the issue of poverty and our failure to deal with it. The author examines the ideas and assumptions that have shaped pubic policy from Johnson's War on Poverty to Reagan's war on welfare. He probes the categories used to describe poor people ('deserving' and 'undeserving'), reassesses the work of the influential thinkers, and exposes the ideological bias of such controversial concepts as 'the culture of poverty' and, more recently, 'the underclass.' In both the conservative and the liberal camps, he identifies a peculiar American tendency to blame poverty on the individual deficiencies of the poor, rather than on the social forces that generate it. -- Publisher description.