Poverty reduction remains a challenge for US

The United States is known as the richest and most powerful country in the world. It could afford to spend more than a trillion US dollars on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and builds B-2 stealth bombers that cost $2 billion a piece. Yet daily life in its cities often defies such an image.

On my way to and from work via the Washington, D.C. Metro, it's almost always the beggars who greet passengers coming in and out of the stations. They include both men and women, old and young. Some hold signs saying "hungry", "out of work", "homeless" or "homeless veteran".

And outside the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial Library just two blocks from my stop, the Metro Center, there are lines every day of homeless people waiting for free meals distributed by charity organizations or shelter buses coming to pick them up and take them to a place to stay. Although some of the homeless choose to sleep on park benches or some in cardboard boxes in alleyways. On freezing winter days, such as those two weeks ago in Washington and New York, some homeless slept on the sidewalks over the subway grates where the rising heat kept them warm.