Last week, the Census Bureau released a report on poverty that found that the number of Americans living in poverty has risen to 15.1 percent, the highest it has been since 1983:
About 46.2 million people, or nearly one in six, were in poverty in 2010, compared with 43.6 million, or 14.3 percent, in 2009.
The statistics, contained in the report, titled “Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage: 2010,” cover 2010, when U.S. unemployment averaged 9.6 percent, up from 9.3 percent the previous year.
Highlights:
- Median household income for the nation was $49,400 in 2010, a decline of 2.3 percent from 2009, when inflation is figured in.
- The 2010 official poverty rate for the nation was 15.1 percent, up from 14.3 percent in 2009, with 46.2 million people in poverty, an increase of 2.6 million since 2009.
- The percentage of people without health insurance coverage in 2010, 16.3 percent, was not statistically different from the rate in 2009. The number of uninsured increased to 49.9 million in 2010 from 49 million in 2009.
And, note to Rick Perry, the bureau found that if Social Security were eliminated, it would add another 14 million people, all of them older than 65, of course, into the impoverished category.
“Piffle,” says the Heritage Foundation, the stuck-in-the-Reagan-era, right-wing “think” tank most famous today for inventing the individual mandate in health-insurance reform that was deployed in Massachusetts’ “Romneycare” and in the federal Affordable Care Act.
Americans don’t know from poverty, Heritage claimed in a report released in July, and they won’t until they are made to live like real poor people in Third World countries — until they have to subsist on $10 a week and are forced to live without modern conveniences like refrigerators and televisions.
Al Lewis
takes on Heritage for suggesting that Americans are not poor enough, writing in today’s edition of the Murdoch/Fox Wall St. Journal:
You want to see poor, go with the World Bank definition of income of $1.25 or less a day. This puts anyone who eats two items a day from the McDonald’s $1 menu in fat city.
Then there are those who will argue that even $1.25 a day isn’t poor since there are millions of people who don’t spend any money at all. For them, even $0 is OK because they live in agrarian societies where they can get by with barter.
But not in America.
“Poor families certainly struggle to make ends meet, but in most cases, they are struggling to pay for air conditioning and the cable-TV bill as well as to put food on the table,” writes the conservative Heritage Foundation in a July report.
Heritage points this out so tax dollars aren’t misallocated to welfare programs.
It says the Census Bureau’s poverty report, “though widely publicized by the press, provides only a bare count of the number of Americans who are allegedly poor.” Emphasis added.
The report notes that 99.9 percent of U.S. households have a refrigerato and 98.7 percent have a television. But cheap appliances from Wal-Mart or second-hand ones from Goodwill do not lift people out of poverty. And televisions only make the poor more aware of what they don’t have.
Poverty deniers also like to attack the official poverty rate by noting that today’s poor enjoy conveniences that were affordable only to the rich in generations past. Toilet paper was once a luxury. Is anyone with continuous access to a continuous roll not to be counted as poor?
Just yesterday we published an item about a new report from the Economic Policy Institute that found that, since 1983, the top 5 percent of American households have obtained 81.7 percent of the nation’s wealth.
It’s interesting that both these reports reference 1983, which was near the midpoint in the Reagan era and around the time that Republicans codified their “trickle down” economic theories into tax law.
It’s purely a coincidence, of course.
One thought on “Poverty Rate Rises to Quarter Century High”