poverty in america

I don't know why they're so late with the news, but yesterday the Census Bureau announced that median income in the U.S. fell significantly between 2007 and 2008.

The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that real median household income in the United States fell 3.6 percent between 2007 and 2008, from$52,163 to $50,303. This breaks a string of three years of annual income increases and coincides with the recession that started in December 2007.

The nation’s official poverty rate in 2008 was 13.2 percent, up from 12.5 percent in 2007. There were 39.8 million people in poverty in 2008, up from 37.3 million in 2007.

Keep in mind the Census Bureau figures are from the days before the recession really got cooking. Since 2008, things have continued to get worse.

So exactly how poor do you have to be to be "considered in povery?" Pretty doggone poor, as it turns out:

As defined by the Office of Management and Budget and updated for inflation using the Consumer Price Index, the weighted average poverty threshold for a family of four in 2008 was $22,025; for a family of three, $17,163; for a family of two, $14,051; and for unrelated individuals, $10,991.

Felix Salmon's blog (linked above) also contains information from a Brookings Institution study by Emily Monea and Isabel Sawhill (which shows) that “the poverty rate will increase rapidly through 2011 or 2012, at which point about 14.4 percent of the country will be in poverty”, and that the number of children living in poverty could rise by 5 million, or 38%, to 18 million.

Poverty is now at a higher level in the U.S. than it's been in a decade. The official figures don't reflect it, but there are close to 30 million effectively unemployed in this country today, and over 40 million with no medical insurance.

The tax policies of the last 30 years have now borne their bitter fruit. Under these policies, income in the U.S. has dramatically shifted upward, away from the middle, working, and poor classes and become more and more concentrated in the hands of the top one percent of income earners. These policies have been delivered to a rich oligarchy by a servile and corrupted Congress, whose members are iced by the very oligarchy in whose service they labor to pass such undemocratic laws.

Pity the poor people of the United States -- so far from democracy and so close to foreclosure, unemployment, and bankruptcy.

Atrios (eschatonblog.com) supplied the info and links for this post.