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Economists: US Poverty On Track To Hit Highest Level Since 1960s
First time accepted submitter eentory writes "According to economists and other experts surveyed by the Associated Press, the U.S. poverty rate is on track to hit its highest level since the 1960s. The consensus among those surveyed is that 'the official poverty rate will rise from 15.1 percent in 2010, climbing as high as 15.7 percent.' Just a 0.1 percent increase would put the poverty rate at its highest since 1965."
http://i.imgur.com/olQxJ.jpg
Says it all.
No, this is a new system called Trickle Up Poverty. They found it reaches the middle class faster if it goes up.
goddamn greedy teachers with their gold-plated Celicas.
Its only going to climb higher. I am up in Canada, but its the same here, all I see is businesses closing, programs being cut, the only jobs available seem to be for crap wages with no benefits etc. The economy is failing from the bottom up as the small businesses die off one by one. Meanwhile of course, the high end executives get massive yearly bonuses as a matter of course - even if the company they are working at is tanking and likely to go under.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
I thought the idea was to give Mittens the reigns, let the corporations have 100% control of our country (vs the current insulting 98%), and hope for some trickle down?
There's a third alternative: Gary Johnson.
In the rest of the world, those amounts can actually buy you things like food and shelter.
Last I checked(and I check pretty much every fucking day), it's pretty goddamned difficult to buy food and shelter on that much money in the U.S..
People in the U.S. don't believe they are entitled to more. People in the U.S. pay more for things than people in the rest of the world, so people in the U.S. need more money to buy an equivalent amount of said things.
Enjoy your caviar, fucktard.
You think the last 4 years are what did this?
You don't think the last several decades might have had more of an impact?
working their way down to the grunt workers
No, they wealth is trickling SIDEWAYS into tax-shelters.
http://www.businessinsider.com/rich-21-trillion-31-trillion-offshore-tax-havens-2012-7?op=1
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Yep. It goes back at least to Bush I, probably much earlier.
I say we blame everything on Nixon. That's when things started going downhill and the budget started spiraling upward.
Plus, he makes a good scapegoat. He's already "evil" in the public eye; why not blame him for starting America's decline as well as for Vietnam and Watergate?
This article is nonsense. My extended family is working class and none of them could ever afford air conditioning. They are what you might call the "working poor". Never mind "the poor".
That link sounds like the clueless ramblings of a modern day Marie Antoinette.
If the poor are "fed" or "sheltered" there is a good chance that this is only the case because of public assistance.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
We've outsourced everything and the capital hides in offshore accounts.
Should be no surprise that poverty is up.
Marx was right.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Congressional Republicans have voted down every proposal to help the economy the President has sent to them, even proposals tailored after Republican tactics for economic handling.
Remember this in November, vote the Republicans in the Senate and Congress out.
They are making the country and most likely you, poorer, just because they are in a pissing contest with the president.
They don't deserve your support
You know trickle down had some merit in a world before a telecommunications revolution and easy shipping. In that world corporations HAD to competively hire local people to get work done. We're past that.
Right now allowing the top 1% to make money off of easy imports of overseas goods is to the GDP what a empty calories are to your diet.
The true cause for this, wholesale adaptation of Reagan's economic philosophies, will never be identified or addressed, and the middle class will continue to shrink, and will only gain ground (temporary ground) during bubbles. And when those bubbles pop, the middle class slides back even more.
Says it all.
No, it doesn't say it all. It doesn't say that the poverty line is much higher today than in 1960, so implying that people are worse off is nonsense. It also doesn't say that our definition of "poverty" is silly: it only counts income, and ignores assets. I live in Silicon Valley in a nice neighborhood with a paid off mortgage, and my wife drives a snazzy BMW. I run my own company and usually make a solid six figure income. But in 2010, I had several employees in R&D mode, my net income was nearly zero, I fell below the poverty line. I actually qualified for some government handouts. That is seems absurd to me.
Nixon was a *much* better president than Bush II. He actually had accomplishments.
Bush Jr will get his proper place in history... as a person that used his 8 years (and an major terror attack that occurred on US soil) to funnel money to his buddies. I don't buy any attempt to say Bush was part of 9/11, but he sure as hell took advantage of it.
What did you expect? That link points to the "Heritage Foundation."
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
In almost all states it takes over 80 hours of work PER WEEK for someone making minimum wage to pay for a shoddy apartment.
You, sir, are an idiot.
Actually you're the idiot. I know several people on the gov't dole. And the ONLY reason they say do NOT get a job is that they would need to get a job pay X amount so it would be worth getting off the dole. They say why get off the gov't teat IF they(and their family) would be worse off.
Would you support raising the minimum wage so that all jobs pay more than gov't assistance?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
"According to a 2011 paper by poverty expert Robert Rector, of the 43.6 million Americans deemed to be below the poverty level by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2009, the majority had adequate shelter, food, clothing and medical care. In addition, the paper stated that those assessed to be below the poverty line in 2011 have a much higher quality of living than those who were identified by the census 40 years ago as being in poverty."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States
These days we count poverty as economic disparity, which is not the historical definition of poverty. Today, if you have access to medical care, housing and food, we state that you are living in poverty. That is not to say there aren't those living in legitimate poverty.
Malnourishment is down, and yet we insist poverty is near all-time highs.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
The economy isn't a zero-sum game. If someone is doing well, they usually invest the money (hopefully being put to productive use) or they exchange their money for goods and services.
The problem is frankly monetary policy. I know, I know. I'm a crazy Ron Paul-type.
Here's what I think is going on. Since we left the gold standard, the amount of money has increased by a lot. Where newly printed money hits the system first (like Wall Street for example) those people get to use the money first and get a big benefit. By the time that money trickles down to the rest of society, all those newly printed dollars mean a loss of purchasing power and the overall value of each dollar.
Almost any chart I've seen about how workers are doing worse from a variety of different sources, the point in the chart where everything goes crazy is the early 70s. 10 years prior to Reagan, but the same time Nixon took America off the gold standard.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
His platform is to end the IRS? I can't see any potentially nasty side effects of that.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It speaks volumes that the only "real alternative" available across the country in this election is one who would remove even more of the few regulations left to protect us from corporate excess. Look at "Gary Johnson's track record". He brags about being "an outspoken advocate for...protection of civil liberties", and a couple sentences later he brags about how he "privatized half of the state prisons". WTF?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
That's a Republican lie. Wealth is not created in the boardroom, it's created in the programmer's cube, the recording studio, the factory floor, the fry-cook's stove, the copper mine. Wealth is created by the poor and middle class.
Wealth doesn't trickle down, it flows upwards. The wealthy don't create wealth, they aggregate and control wealth.
Free Martian Whores!
they are rent seeking parasites
a capitalist wants a marketplace of equals competing (which is only maintained by health regulations)
a rent seeking parasite will talk about capitalism a lot, but what they really want is their monopoly or oligopoly preserved. so any government regulation or taxation is evil and anti-capitalist... when of course, the monopoly or oligopoly whining about capitalism is the genuine anti-capitalist force
the greatest enemy of capitalism is not "socialism" (the random bogeyman curse word that has no relevant meaning in the USA), it is anti-competitive practices by entrenched large players, including corrupting our government
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It seems to me today that "poverty" is on par with 1960s luxury, so what's the point?
In 1960 a college graduate could own a home and support a family on one full time salary. In 2012, positions like that are vanishingly rare.
At what point are these people choosing poverty
Perhaps you didn't notice the recent financial crisis and the boom in unemployment. Do you think these people "chose" to be unemployed? Did you choose to be this obtuse?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
First off, working 80 hours nets you 100 hours of pay via overtime.
Only if the 80 hours are on the same job.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
a rent seeking parasite will talk about capitalism a lot, but what they really want's is their monopoly or oligopoly preserved. so any government regulation or taxation is evil and anti-capitalist
That's nonsense. Rent-seekers ADORE government regulation. It puts smaller competitors at a disadvantage, erects barriers to entry, and if the rent-seeker is politically well-connected, lets the rent-seeker employ regulators as its personal enforcement arm against interlopers in its markets.
Well considering that Nixon took the US off the Gold Standard, effectively turning into a "fiat currency" that the bankers have complete control over -- you may have made a very profound point.
For it was Jefferson that predicted that the Bankers and Corporations would enrich themselves and cast the people into poverty. In 2000, a family of four making $90k a year was considered poverty level in Silicon Valley. Now days it would not surprise me to see that bar raised to $125,000 since US buying power has fallen sharply and greatly increased gas prices have led to greater costs for food (up 30% over the last ten years) and other basic living necessities.
At the rate we're going, with raising gas and food prices and climate change slated to increase and make farming harder -- most every middle-class American will hit poverty level in the next decade. Or so that's what MIT, the Pentagon and a couple other research Institutions predict.
The news report quantifies the US poverty level as a pair of statistics:
But it doesn't go on to describe the lifestyle of a person in that income group. I mean, suppose a person chooses to live without a car, a yearly vacation abroad, or the latest iDevice. Surely that person's poverty level would be different from a person who chooses to have a car, take yearly vacations abroad, and buy the latest iPhone?
Let's start with the individual:
Average rent:$650 x 12= $7800/yr
$11,139 - $7,800 housing cost = $3,339 left
Average monthly grocery bill for a single male age 19-50 (without malnourished oneself): $250 x 12 = $3,000 grocery cost
$3,339 - $3,000 = $339 left
Average utility bill for > 700 sq. ft. apartment: $150/mo x 12 = $1,800
$339 - $1,800 = -$1,461
Go ahead and double the rent/utils, quadruple the grocery cost for the family of 4.
Lifestyle has nothing to do with it.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Check this out: Government spending by president. This shows that while Obama may have been spending a lot during a recession, something that many economists encourage to balance out the "good years", the real culprits of out of control government spending are Reagan, Bush and Bush.
Reagan can also be somewhat forgiven due to the economic problems in the 80s and encouraging government spending to make up for the loss in business generated GDP, however he was there for 8 years... and that recession did not last 8 years.
Just looking at the fiscal realities, Clinton was by far the best president if it weren't for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act which set the stage for "too big to fail" banks. Still from a spending standpoint he's by far the best.
Obama is overspending driven by rampant bankster cronyism stemming originally from the Bush era and into the Obama years. This started with TARP (Bush) and continued into QEII, III, and further. There's a good argument to be made that much of the current spending is momentum spending from the second Bush term.
Ultimately we have to look beyond the last 3.5 years and really examine longer term track records before we conclude that the Dems overspend or the Repubs drive up debt.
Read what I mean, not what I wrote.
"Who in the country actually works for minimum wage? A small number indeed, 1 to 2%."
"In 2011, 73.9 million American workers age 16 and over were paid at hourly rates, representing 59.1 percent of all wage and salary workers.1 Among those paid by the hour, 1.7 million earned exactly the prevailing Federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. About 2.2 million had wages below the minimum.2 Together, these 3.8 million workers with wages at or below the Federal minimum made up 5.2 percent of all hourly-paid workers."
http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage2011.htm
"Apparently you have been asleep for a few decades. This is Hope and Change!"
No, I think you and the author of the parent post have both been asleep for a few decades and were dreaming that you were awake.
In the last few decades, BOTH Republicans and Democrats have had their opportunity to govern by simultaneously holding the Presidency and majorities in both houses of Congress.
Furthermore, no other party has controlled either the legislative or executive branch in that time.
They swap power back and forth, but the real legislative agenda never changes. Bigger government, military interventionism, reckless fiscal and monetary policy, stagnant real wages, special favors for the privileged elites, fewer civil liberties, more rules and regulations, etc. etc.
Your partisan bickering is nonsense. U.S. politics is like pro wrestling. Yelling, fighting and bitter enmity in front of the cameras, then kicking back and having drinks together while they laugh at the fools who think it's "real".
You can do that...where you are, and where you can drive to the supermarket.
Try going to a neighborhood where there is a lot of subsidized housing, and try finding your raw ingredients anywhere you can walk to. Most supermarket chains have left impoverished areas, and the only place to get groceries are places like Dollar General or convenience stores. The selection of fruits and vegetables there is lacking, to put it mildly.
Go on, citizen, stamp the vote card. R or D, your choice.