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."

Comments

Relevant

[Anonymous Coward]

http://i.imgur.com/olQxJ.jpg

Says it all.

Re:Relevant

[Anonymous Coward]

Why did Obama wait until he lost control of Congress to try and revive the economy?

I am not a fan of Obama, but he never had control of Congress. I believe what you refer to as "control" was 59 Democrats + 1 Indep, with 60 votes needed to break a filibuster. So he would need absolute unanimous support and the support of Lieberman (who negotiated quite a bit for his single vote).
That's a very theoretical "control", that could be broken by luring one person away (or even someone sick/campaigning/etc/).

Re:Relevant

[slimjim8094]

Frankly, I think Obama believed his own rhetoric. As commander-in-chief, he also could've forced the states to accept the Gitmo prisoners (don't you remember he was working with governors a few months into his presidency?) but was unwilling to hand down orders and instead tried to compromise. Like he said he would do in his campaign.

Unfortunately, I think it took him until the 2010 midterms to realize that the Republicans really meant it when they said they'd rather torpedo the country than work with him on anything, and by then it was too late.

Re:Relevant

[GodInHell]

Funny how the stimulus act exists when Republicans want to bash Obama on the debt, and then ceases to exist when they want to ask what he's done about job creation.

The graphs tell the tale, when the stimulus kicked in jobs recovered, when it began to phase out, job growth stalled -- all the while Obama has proposed additional stimulus and gotten thwacked in the knockers for it every time.

Re:Relevant

[DeadCatX2]

The majority of voters overwhelmingly like what the PPACA provides for (no denial on pre-existing conditions, no lifetime limits on benefits, minimum 85% of premiums goes toward benefits, etc). What they don't like is the mandate, mostly because the noise surrounding the legislation prevents them from knowing exactly what the mandate says.

Oh, and by the way, the idea of a mandate is an entirely conservative approach toward health insurance reform. So if/when PPACA fails to bring down costs (because we still aren't negotiating bulk discounts for Medicare Part D, because we still ban drug reimportation, because we still don't have a centralized standard for portable electronic medical records, because hospitals still need entire departments to sort out billing, etc), don't blame it on "liberals", because the PPACA is most definitely not how a "liberal" would want health insurance reform to be executed.

Re:Relevant

[davidannis]

Obama didn't wait. He implemented TARP (passed under Bush), bailed out the automakers, did cash for clunkers, a two year extension of the Bush tax cuts, a partial payroll tax holiday, home energy efficiency credits, etc. He tried to get the banks to voluntarily renegotiate mortgages. Meanwhile the Fed cut interest rates to zero, did two rounds of quantitative easing, and loaned money to banks foreign and domestic.

Remember that Obama inherited a real mess. John McCain was so worried about a collapse of our financial system that he suspended his campaign and went back to Washington to make sure that TARP got through. Bush had turned the Clinton surpluses (I remember talk of retiring the twenty year treasuries) into record deficits.

While he did all of that the Republicans screamed about deficits and the threat of inflation. If he'd tried more stimulus, perhaps they would have been right. Trying to Do more would also have increased the chances of more of his agenda being blocked. It seems to me that you are faulting Obama for making choices that didn't magically turn what many feared would be the next Great Depression into an economic boom. Given the pickle he was put in, I say he did a fine job of balancing the need for stimulus, political compromise, the threat of inflation, and the size of the deficit.

And with the current folks in power

[Phrogman]

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.

Re:Official MinTruth Statement

[ohnocitizen]

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?

Re:Poverty? Gimme a break.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Official MinTruth Statement

[h4rr4r]

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?

Re:But this can't be right

[polar red]

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

Re:Official MinTruth Statement

[gman003]

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?

Re:Stop redefining proverty.

[jedidiah]

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.

Remember This In November

[assertation]

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

Re:Official MinTruth Statement

[MickyTheIdiot]

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.

Re:Official MinTruth Statement

[MickyTheIdiot]

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.

Re:Pay to be Poor

[kilfarsnar]

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?

Re:trickle down

[mcgrew]

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.

Re:Relative Poverty Value?

[Hatta]

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?

Re:Poverty? Gimme a break.

[amorsen]

First off, working 80 hours nets you 100 hours of pay via overtime.

Only if the 80 hours are on the same job.

Rent seekers love government regulation

[John Jorsett]

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.

Re:they aren't capitalists

[iluvcapra]

a rent seeking parasite will talk about capitalism a lot, but what they really want is their monopoly or oligopoly preserved.

Never trust someone who says he "believes in capitalism" unless he's been bankrupt at least once.

Rich people too easily to confuse capitalism with "everything that's making me rich at this moment." Everybody basically sees themselves as a good person, and as long as rich people are rich, they're going to generally believe that they "deserve" it on some kind of moral level, even though a political economy cannot be simultaneously free by a libertarian's definition and reward social virtue, the two are orthogonal. Most philosophers have recognized this for hundreds of years, which is why thoughtful free-marketers at least as far back as Adam Smith generally advocated progressive taxation and transfers, Friedrich Hayek believed in government health insurance, etc.

The fact is, nobody really believes in capitalism in extremis, what they really fight for is the right to make money the way they remember their parents did, and to a lesser extent how they know previous generations did, based on prevailing historical narrative.

This phenomenon is very similar to the fight over gay marriage: gay marriage opponents claim they're fighting for a sanctified, thousand-year-old tradition, when in fact they're really fighting for the institution as it existed, religiously and socially, circa 1975, around the time their parents were married.

Re:Let's really have a look at spending

[Curunir_wolf]

You know what? The Constitution puts the spending power in the hands of Congress, not the president. So, take a look at where the deficits are really happening

Re:they aren't capitalists

[iluvcapra]

This stuff's been floating around for years:

Yer Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations:

The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.

There is an argument that this quote is taken out of context, in that it appears in a long passage where Smith denigrates various methods of tax collection, but most people agree that even if he is opposed to a tax on income, he is supportive of a tax regime which is progressive in effect, regardless of how it's collected.

Hayek in Road to Serfdom:

Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision. Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance, where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks, the case for the state helping to organise a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong. There are many points of detail where those wishing to preserve the competitive system and those wishing to supersede it by something different will disagree on the details of such schemes; and it is possible under the name of social insurance to introduce measures which tend to make competition more or less ineffective. But there is no incompatibility in principle between the state providing greater security in this way and the preservation of individual freedom.

The counterargument to this is that the text systematically rejects any mechanism by which a state could operate such a system, only that it should "help to organize" such a system. So I guess it depends on your sense of the term "help."