Concentrated poverty in inner cities will remain. In many inner-city neighborhoods, most adults are not working in a typical week. Men's earnings will continue to decline and will be a smaller proportion of a family's income than in the past. States now spend more per year on prisons than on higher education while ten years ago spending priorities were just the opposite. These trends will continue.
Minorities are likely to become an increasing percentage of means-tested public benefits.
Already TANF is made up of a majority of participants who are minority and this fact is not likely to be reversed by a moderate slow-down in the economy. In non-means tested programs, women will continue to be the primary beneficiaries. For example, sixty percent of Social Security beneficiaries are women and Social Security is the major source of retirement income for a majority of these women. Pension and retirement savings systems are especially inadequate for women. Perhaps the greatest changes in the practice of poverty law arise from devolution, the now-common description of the shift in responsibility from the federal to the state level for social programs.