21st century blues – Poverty Rising
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Shocking new statistics
1 in 6 Americans live in poverty
The 2010 data released by the U.S. Census Bureau reads like a bad novel. The number of Americans living in poverty rose to 46.2 million last year, nearly one in six people.
The 2010 data shows the poverty rate at 15.1%, from 14.3% in 2009. The number of Americans without health insurance also rose slightly to 49.9 million. The poverty rate was the highest since 1983, and tied with the level in 1993. The number of Americans living below the poverty line has now risen for four years in a row.
The U.S. definition of poverty is an annual income of $22,314, or less for a family of four, and $11,139 for a single person.
Without help from the federal government, millions more people would have sunk below the poverty line in 2010, U.S. Census data shows.
Unemployment insurance helped keep 3.2 million Americans out of poverty in 2010, according to the new statistics. Without this vital lifeline, which lasts up to 99 weeks, these jobless folks would have joined the roughly 46.2 million people now considered in poverty.
The United States may not be the richest country in the world any more, nonetheless, poverty on this scale, in this country, is nothing short of criminal.
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Nothing, logic forbid, could be as simple as: tax, tax, tax, tax, the f……g churches. I mean, look at how America is becoming a theocratic gov’t. I wonder if poverty and religiosity are intertwined? America, get the hell out of everybody else’s country and stop bombing them to death because you need their oil and think that they’d be happier being a democratic state. Take half the money from the military and put it into science, research and social programs that will actually help Americans and mankind. I am surprised the American people haven’t had a revolution, YET ! Oh, yeah, Yahweh wouldn’t let that happen.
Indeed! The great American middle class created by the New Deal legislation is melting away faster than a Greenland glacier! The corporate powers that be have been chipping away at the New Deal & its resultant middle class since day one & the rate of destruction has increased exponentially over the past 30 years. It seems that what has actually “trickled down” is the bottom of the middle class into poverty… (See: http://robertreich.org/post/5993482080)