It’s interesting how the New York Times reports this story, by pointing out the rate rather than the sheer number, to try to protect Obama. But you can also look at it this way: poverty is at its highest NUMBER ever recorded; and it is at its HIGHEST RATE since the LAST time a Democrat was president. Because, um, for the record, Bill Clinton was president in 1993.
Barack Obama and his liberal Keynesian policies have completely failed.
U.S. Poverty Rate, at 15 Percent, Is the Highest Since 1993
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Published: September 13, 2011Another 2.6 million people slipped below the poverty line in 2010, meaning 46.2 million people now live in poverty in the United States, the highest number in the 52 years the Census Bureau has been tracking it, said Trudi Renwick, chief of the Poverty Statistic Branch at the Census Bureau.
That figure represented 15.1 percent of the population, up from 14.3 percent in 2009, and 11.7 percent at the beginning of the decade in 2001. The poverty line in 2010 for a family of four was $22,113.
And in new signs of economic distress among the middle class, median household incomes adjusted for inflation declined by 2.3 percent in 2010 from the previous year to $49,400. That was 7 percent less than the peak of $53,252 in 1999.
The report comes as President Obama gears up to pass a jobs bill, and analysts said the bleak numbers could help him make his case for urgency. But they could also be used against him by Republican opponents seeking to highlight economic shortcomings under his watch as the election season gets under way.
“This is one more piece of bad news on the economy,” said Ron Haskins, co-director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution. “This will be another cross to bear by the administration.”
The annual report by the Census Bureau offered a portrait of the American economy one year into the economic recovery. Its findings, which included figures for poverty, median income and the number of uninsured Americans, were bleaker than many economists expected and reinforced the worry that the economy has a long way to go before middle-class families feel any improvement.
“A full year into recovery, there were no signs of it affecting the well-being of a typical American family,” said Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard. “By late 2010, the economy was sort of dead in the water, and that’s where it’s remained.”
Joblessness was the driving force pushing more Americans into poverty, economists said. Last year, about 86 million people of working age did not work even one week out of the year, Ms. Renwick said, up from 83 million in 2009, a trend of increasing long-term joblessness that economists say puts families at greater economic risk.
“Once you’ve been out of work for a long time, it’s a very difficult road to get back,” Mr. Katz said.
Median household income fell across all working-age categories, but was sharpest among the youngest Americans, ages 15 to 24, who experienced a decline of 9 percent.
According to the Census figures, the median annual income for a male full-time, year-round worker in 2010 — $47,715 — was virtually unchanged in 2010 dollars, from its level in 1973, when it was $49,065, said Sheldon Danziger, professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. Particularly hard hit, he said, were those who do not have college degrees.
“That’s not about the poor and unemployed, that’s full time, year round,” Professor Danziger said. “The median, full-time male worker has made no progress on average.”
The recession continued to push Americans, particularly young people, to double up in households with friends and family.
The group of 25-to-34-year-olds experienced a 25 percent rise in living at home in the period between 2007, when the recession began, and 2011. Of that group, nearly half were living below the poverty line, when their parents’ incomes were excluded.
“We’re risking a new underclass,” said Timothy Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research and Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “Young, less educated adults, mainly men, can’t support their children and form stable families because they are jobless.”
More Americans fell into deep poverty, defined as less than half the official poverty line, or about $11,000, with the ranks of that group increasing to 20.5 million, or about 6.7 percent of the population.
Poverty also swallowed more children, with about 22 percent of all children living below the poverty line, up from 20.7 percent in 2009.
“It was a surprisingly large increase in the overall poverty rate,” said Arloc Sherman, senior researcher at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “We see record numbers and percentages of Americans in deep poverty.”
But it’s NOT a surprisingly large increase. Because Barack Obama is murdering America and killing its ability to compete and create jobs for its citizens.
It’s only “surprising” if you actually were stupid enough to believe that Obama’s Marxism would ever do anything other than what it’s clearly done: fail wildly.
This is EXACTLY what conservatives told anyone who would listen what would happen. Read this story I wrote about the stupid and immoral minimum wage increase. I cited other conservatives who PREDICTED abject disaster; and what did we get? ABJECT DISASTER. It wasn’t some bizarre unfortunate coincidence; it was the necessary outcome of a stupid policy which priced low-wage labor right out of the workplace.
WE TOLD YOU THIS WOULD HAPPEN. You Democrats are stupid and you are evil. You cynically claim to help the poor, but you crush them, you grind them down, you turn them into an eternally-dependent underclass and then you continually fearmonger their welfare check in order to make them your slaves every election. What you do is cynical, despicable and depraved.
These poor people look at you for help – because you made them ignorant with your government schools – and then you sell them snake oil by the barrel-full to keep them dependent on you.
You made the poor bad and corrupt people who vote for bad and corrupt people and bad and corrupt policies.
The U.S. economy is at its worst since – guess when – THE LAST TIME A DEMOCRAT SOCIALIST WAS RUNNING IT.
When Obama sold us the gigantic load of lies known as “the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act” that amounted to $862 billion – and actually $3.27 TRILLION – worth of pork, he said that his massive boondoggle would create millions of jobs and get people out of poverty. Obama talked endlessly about “shovel-ready jobs”; now he’s selling the same load of fertlizer and saying that there are a “million construction workers ready to get dirty.” He lied to you then, and he’s lying to you again. And if you are a truly stupid and vile human being, you’ll believe his lies.
We need to have a massive purge of Democrats and liberalism and recognize once and for all that their way is the way to hell. Before it is too late.
Tags: 46.2 million, Census Bureau, highest number, highest rate, living in poverty, poverty, stimulus
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