Here’s a moderate-to-conservative think-tank-based view of poverty and poverty policies:

It would increase the productivity and reduce the heat of the Washington debate on poverty and opportunity if all sides agreed to base their understanding of poverty and mobility on the basic facts laid out above, all from reliable sources. Here is a summary of these facts:

• Government spending on poor and low-income families has increased almost every year for five decades; since 1980 spending has tripled as measured on a per person in poverty basis in constant dollars
• An improved measure of poverty shows that government spending focused on poor and low-income households cuts the poverty rate by about half; government spending on these programs and the Unemployment Compensation program prevented poverty from increasing during the most severe recession since the Great Depression
• A CBO analysis shows that when government benefits are counted at their full value, households all along in income distribution, including those in the bottom 20 percent, enjoyed increased income between 1979 and 2007
• The same CBO report shows that because income increased more the higher up we look in the income distribution between 1979 and 2007, income inequality has also increased since 1979; by far the biggest increase in inequality is between the top and the rest of the distribution
• Several studies show that claims that intergenerational income mobility has slowed down in the U.S. are false; the U.S. has less income mobility that many European nations, but mobility has remained constant over the past four decades or so; nonetheless, children whose parents were in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution have more than a 40 percent chance of staying in the bottom themselves.

https://www.brookings.edu/testimonies/poverty-and-opportunity-begin-with-facts/