Posted on 12/15/2011 5:33:19 AM PST by markomalley
Squeezed by rising living costs, a record number of Americans — nearly 1 in 2 — have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income.
The latest census data depict a middle class that's shrinking as unemployment stays high and the government's safety net frays. The new numbers follow years of stagnating wages for the middle class that have hurt millions of workers and families.
"Safety net programs such as food stamps and tax credits kept poverty from rising even higher in 2010, but for many low-income families with work-related and medical expenses, they are considered too 'rich' to qualify," said Sheldon Danziger, a University of Michigan public policy professor who specializes in poverty.
"The reality is that prospects for the poor and the near poor are dismal," he said. "If Congress and the states make further cuts, we can expect the number of poor and low-income families to rise for the next several years."
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
This piece is a report from the battlefield. The war on poverty has been lost. All the weapons created and used to fight and win the war have been for naught.
The war is lost
The Generals must be rounded up and eliminated.
There is so much fundamentally wrong with this I hardly know where to begin. Picking a random part "University of Michigan professor" OK what you have here is a taxpayer funded bureaucrat whose quantity of swill is determined by how much noise he makes. After all even though a public university trough is pretty big, you have an awful lot of hogs (academics) rooting, grunting and shoving to get as much as they can of it. SO he has every incentive to FIND non-existant problems in his field, and then to tout them as loudly as he can.
Safety net programs such as food stamps and tax credits kept poverty from rising even higher in 2010
Actually by taking money away from the private sector and hence away from business and capital formation these programs INCREASED poverty by reducing job availability. The public policy moron assumes that those out of work are incapable of shifting from one form of employment to another and their only recourse is to reach into the pockets of their hardworking fellow citizens. To the extent that the indolent indigent have ABSOLUTELY NO MOTIVE TO LOOK FOR WORK as long as the so-called "safety nets" are funneling money their way he is correct. Why work when you can get paid to do nothing?
low-income families
A couple of things here first who decides what is "low income?" My income is less than the top 1% does that make me low income? How many of these "low income" families have
who specializes in poverty
This is worth about 500 words alone, but what's the point? It's for the children (Do I really need to add the sarcasm tag?)
Bingo.
That headline cannot be true in any real sense. One in two people are not poor or low income in any common sense use of those words. I don’t like the way things are headed either, and the case could be made that we are headed for disaster, but half the population is not poor or low income. Someone sent me an email the other day with photos form the Great Depression. THOSE people were poor and low income. And that was within the memory of some living today.
I’ve never seen a starving poor person in my town, and we have hundreds of them tramping around the center of town.
And yes, many have cell phones, and some even have new laptops! You have to see it to really get the full effect.
And dont get me started on relatives that are on welfare but have flatscreen TVs and broadband internet while my TV is straight out of 1994.
"About 97.3 million Americans fall into a low-income category, commonly defined as those earning between 100 and 199 percent of the poverty level, based on a new supplemental measure by the Census Bureau that is designed to provide a fuller picture of poverty. Together with the 49.1 million who fall below the poverty line and are counted as poor, they number 146.4 million, or 48 percent of the U.S. population. That's up by 4 million from 2009, the earliest numbers for the newly developed poverty measure."
"The new measure of poverty takes into account medical, commuting and other living costs. Doing that helped push the number of people below 200 percent of the poverty level up from 104 million, or 1 in 3 Americans, that was officially reported in September.
Always look for the hidden agenda, folks.
The Fox Piven plan calls for increasing poverty to the point of system wide collapse to open the way for marxism.
Well, you have the ability and they have the need. Commissar Obama says redistribution is the fair thing to do..."
Unlikely. Especially since those who make it their profession to create poverty statistics like to boost those numbers, so welfare and tax credits (applied after the adjusted gross income is calculated on the tax form) are usually ignored. In fact, since those programs generally suppress the value of work (at least on the books), many of them probably increase poverty as counted by the poverty pimps.
Most of the world would love to be “poor” in America.
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I've worked in a place where 40 year old men often have never owned a pair of store bought shoes. They made their own sandals from the sidewalls of old tires. a couple lived in caves and others stacked up rocks to make a one room house covered in mud & straw.
In "town" they had a single pump for the village, with open sewers running beside the dirt road.
Most people have no concept of what 3rd world poor is really like. I've tried to share with my kids that vision but honestly, they have no concept.
Exactly. Saved me a comment. Our biggest enemy remains an ignorant or a dependent voter. A test and an income tax bill should be required. Poll tax? Never happen (again).
and the test? It would eliminate a vast majority.
The deomocratic strategy is brilliant. Destroy the middle class, put 1/2 of the country in poverty and who do they go for help? The democrats, of course, who will rob the successful to pay for their minions of dependents.
“The new measure of poverty takes into account medical, commuting and other living costs. “
The government keeps adjusting the threshold to incorporate more and more folks, expanding its sphere of influence.
As I heard or read somewhere, either here or at church, globally speaking, if you flush your toilet with drinking water, you aren’t poor.
I so agree. I wish every “poor” American could spend time in a 3rd world shantytown slum with no running water or underground sewage pipes.
It would learn ‘em fast. They would kiss the ground when they landed back in LAX or JFK.
Great point, I’ll remember that one and cite it often!
I guess most of us on this forum now are members of the unwashed 50%. Pretty soon, the Marxists will just assign everyone of us a member of the bottom 50% to clothe, feed, take shopping, pay for college, fetch lottery tickets and ripple. They can call it the Siamese Plan. “Hey Comrade, I just got home from the factory. Are you ready to go to Best Buy for the new router and iPad? Then we can swing by Taco Bell and share a burrito grande.”
Thirty something years of open borders' importation of third world poverty (tens of millions of illegals and even more of their offspring) has got us to 1 in 2 today.
But, fear not Obama! The continuation of the open-borders/path-to-citizenship/humane/not-heartless/amnesty bullshit of the democrats, and too many republicans & "conservatives," - even here on FR - will get us to the "2 in 3 or 3 in 4" soon enough.
That's when the leftwing will reach the demographic condition of pre-Castro Cuba, pre-Chavez Venezuela, etc., and America will be their prize.
Then again, equal-outcome is the goal, and that means smashing everybody down to the lowest common denominator.
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