Poverty rate in US rises

[Fuckallyall]

From the NY Times

August 30, 2005
U.S. Poverty Rate Rises to 12.7 Percent
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:11 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) --The nation's poverty rate rose to 12.7 percent of the population last year, the fourth consecutive annual increase, the Census Bureau said Tuesday.

The percentage of people without health insurance did not change.

Overall, there were 37 million people living in poverty, up 1.1 million people from 2003.

Asians were the only ethnic group to show a decline in poverty -- from 11.8 percent in 2003 to 9.8 percent last year. The poverty rate among the elderly declined as well, from 10.2 percent in 2003 to 9.8 percent last year.

The last decline in overall poverty was in 2000, when 31.1 million people lived under the threshold -- 11.3 percent of the population.

The number of people without health insurance grew from 45 million to 45.8 million. At the same time, the number of people with health insurance coverage grew by 2 million last year.

Charles Nelson, an assistant division chief at the Census Bureau, said the percentage of uninsured remained steady because of an ''increase in government coverage, notably Medicaid and the state children's health insurance program, that offset a decline in employment-based coverage.''

The median household income, meanwhile, stood at $44,389, unchanged from 2003. Among racial and ethnic groups blacks had the lowest median income and Asians the highest. Median income refers to the point at which half of households earn more and half earn less.

Regionally, income declined only in the Midwest, down 2.8 percent to $44,657. The South was the poorest region and the Northeast and the West had the highest median incomes.

The increase in poverty came despite strong economic growth, which helped create 2.2 million jobs last year.

''I guess what happened last year was kind of similar to what happened in the early 1990s where you had a recession that was officially over and then you had several years after that of rising poverty,'' Nelson said. ''... These numbers do reflect changes between 2003 and 2004. They don't reflect any improvements in the economy in 2005.''

Sheldon Danziger, co-director of the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan, said the poverty number is still much better than the 80s and early 90s.

''The good news is that poverty is a lot lower than it was in 1993, but we went through a hell of an economic boom,'' Danziger said. ''Nobody is predicting we're going to go through another economic boom like that.''

The poverty threshold differs by the size and makeup of a household. For instance, a family of four with two children was considered living in poverty if income was $19,157 or less. For a family of two with no children, it was $12,649. For a person 65 and over living alone, it was 9,060.

The estimates on poverty, uninsured and income are based on supplements to the bureau's Current Population Survey, and are conducted over three months, beginning in February, at about 100,000 households nationwide.

The only city with a million or more residents that exhibited a significant change in poverty level last year was New York City, which saw the rate increase from 19 percent to 20.3 percent.

 

[DJ]

Thats something new ????

 

[Greed]

Calculating Poverty in U.S. Fuels Debate

Calculating Poverty in U.S. Fuels Debate
By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER, Associated Press Writer
Tue Feb 21, 8:13 AM ET

Every year, the Census Bureau uses a 40-year-old formula to determine how many poor people there are in America, a method that many experts think was outdated years ago.

The Census Bureau acknowledges the issue by also announcing alternative poverty rates based on different measurements of income and poverty. This approach has fueled an academic and political debate, but has yet to produce policy changes.

In August, the bureau announced that 12.7 percent of Americans lived in poverty in 2004, making it the official poverty rate. Last week, the bureau said the rate might be as high as 19.4 percent, or as low as 8.3 percent, depending on how income and basic living costs were defined.

One outside analyst said he could cut the poverty rate in half using census data and a pocket calculator. But his exercise would change only the definition of poverty. It wouldn't make anyone richer.

"I know virtually no one who thinks the current poverty line is an accurate measure of poverty," said Rebecca Blank, co-director of the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan.

Blank served on a National Academy of Sciences panel that recommended changes to the poverty measure 10 years ago. But the issue was too politically sensitive to resolve, she and others said.

Some proponents of change want a higher poverty rate to encourage spending on the poor; others want a lower rate to make it easier to cut spending.

"Everybody's got their favorite way of measuring it because the outcome fits their needs," said Martha Farnsworth Riche, who headed the Census Bureau under President Clinton.

The Office of Management and Budget dictates how poverty is measured. But Congress has a keen interest in the issue because it affects so many programs, dollars and lives, Riche said.

"The Census Bureau can't go around changing the poverty rate," Riche said.

The official poverty level is used to decide eligibility for federal health, housing, nutrition and child care benefits. The official poverty rate helps shape national debate on the health of the country's economy.

"There are hundreds of programs moving hundreds of billions of dollars in benefits that are tied to the poverty line," said Douglas Besharov of the American Enterprise Institute.

Part of the problem is that the experts don't agree on how to define income and basic living expenses.

The official poverty level is $19,307 for a family of four, $12,334 for a family of two. But the calculation includes only cash income before deductions for taxes. It excludes capital gains and it does not take into account accumulated wealth or assets, such as a home.

It was based on a calculation of basic living expenses in the 1960s, and has been updated only to reflect inflation.

The result is that a single parent making $13,000 a year is living above the poverty line, while someone with a $1 million house who takes a year off work to travel the world could be below it.

The current system has defenders, but even many of those would like to see changes.

John Cogan, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, said the current system does a good job of gauging whether poverty increases or decreases from year to year.

"Can the way we measure poverty be improved? Absolutely," Cogan said. "Does that mean we should just ignore the country's poverty statistics? Definitely not."

Among the proposals to change the way the government measures poverty:

• Add food stamps, health and housing benefits to incomes. The benefits were intended to decrease poverty, and they would if they were counted as income.

• Subtract taxes, child care and medical costs from incomes, increasing the poverty rate for working Americans.

• Count assets such as homes and securities when determining poverty levels, lowering the poverty rate for seniors on fixed incomes.

• Create regional poverty lines to account for the fact that some places are more expensive to live than others.

Chuck Nelson, an economist at the Census Bureau said, "We see ourselves as the research arm telling people what the effect would be if poverty were based on different measurements. If and when the time comes to change it, people will have information."

___

On the Net:
Census Bureau's report on alternative measurements of poverty:
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/effect2004/effect2004.html

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=sto...u=/ap/20060221/ap_on_go_ot/poverty_politics_2

 

[Greed]

Data show one in eight Americans in poverty

Data show one in eight Americans in poverty
By Joanne Morrison
1 hour, 5 minutes ago

In the world's biggest economy, one in eight Americans and almost one in four blacks lived in poverty last year, the U.S. Census Bureau said on Tuesday, both ratios virtually unchanged from 2004.

The survey also showed 15.9 percent of the population, or 46.6 million, had no health insurance, up from 15.6 percent in 2004 and an increase for a fifth consecutive year, even as the economy grew at a 3.2 percent clip.

It was the first year since President George W. Bush took office in 2001 that the poverty rate did not increase. As in past years, the figures showed poverty especially concentrated among blacks and Hispanics.

In all, some 37 million Americans, or 12.6 percent, lived below the poverty line, defined as having an annual income around $10,000 for an individual or $20,000 for a family of four. The total showed a decrease of 90,000 from the 2004 figure, which Census Bureau officials said was "statistically insignificant."

The last time poverty declined was in 2000, the final year of Bill Clinton's presidency, when it fell to 11.3 percent.

The stagnant poverty picture drew attention from Democrats and others who said not enough is being done to help the nation's poor.

"Far too many American families who work hard and play by the rules still wind up living in poverty," said Rep. George Miller (news, bio, voting record) of California, the top Democrat on the House Education and Workforce Committee.

Around a quarter of blacks and 21.8 percent of Hispanics were living in poverty. Among whites, the rate edged down to 8.3 percent from 8.7 percent in 2004.

"Among African Americans the problem correlates primarily to the inner-city and single mothers," said Michael Tanner of CATO Institute, a free-market think tank in Washington. He noted that blacks also suffer disproportionately from poor education and lower quality jobs.

Black median income, at $30,858, was only 61 percent of the median for whites.

Some 17.6 percent of children under 18 and one in five of those under 6 were in poverty, higher than for any other age group.

Still, real median household income rose by 1.1 percent to $46,326 from $45,817 -- its first increase since 1999. This was taken as a positive move by Republicans and administration officials.

"While we still have challenges ahead, our ability to bounce back is a testament to the strong work ethic of the American people, the resiliency of our economy, and pro-growth economic policies, including tax relief," said Office of Management and Budget Director Rob Portman.

The figures contained wide regional variations, ranging from a median household income of $61,672 in New Jersey to $32,938 for Mississippi.

Major cities with the highest proportions of poor people included Cleveland with 32.4 percent and Detroit with 31.4 percent under the poverty line.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060829/ts_nm/life_usa_poverty_dc

 

[master-ceo]

Re: Data show one in eight Americans in poverty

Great post(s)! Its hard out here mane! $60usd for gas every 2 Days plus bills. Add that up mane.

 

[GET YOU HOT]

Fuckallyall, remember when you posted this?

Thanks for the article, it actually makes a point about what is good in the US. The US actually has the widest distribution of wealth on the planet,or is close to it. THat is good and positive, especially considering we are the first society to actually attempt to implement a free market system.

BTW, you are wrong to state that the US is a capitalist system. It is not.

So, what has changed since last week?

Keep your 9-5 & invest time and money to start your own business...

 

[Greed]

Why Poverty Doesn't Rate

Why Poverty Doesn't Rate
By Nicholas Eberstadt
Sunday, September 3, 2006; B01

The Census Bureau last week released its latest estimate of the U.S. poverty rate -- the country's most important official statistic on domestic want and deprivation. The figure was sobering, signaling short-run stagnation and deterioration over the past generation. The 2005 poverty rate of 12.6 percent barely budged from the previous year's number, and was substantially higher than the 11.1 percent level registered back in 1973, the lowest on record. No less disturbing, the official measure indicates that a greater portion of families and children live in poverty in America today than three decades ago.

The results seem to suggest a prolonged failure of national policies to address poverty in the United States. However, the problem here lies less with actual living conditions than with the flawed and misleading poverty measure itself. The index that Washington has long used to assess progress in the struggle against poverty is a broken compass, and its misdirection has worsened steadily over time. Hurricane Katrina's destruction of the Gulf Coast one year ago revealed in devastating fashion the poverty and hardships that many people in the United States still endure. Unfortunately, the official poverty rate is utterly incapable of tracking material deprivation in the United States with any accuracy.

The nation's poverty indicator first emerged in 1965, when the Johnson administration launched the War on Poverty. This then-novel measure determined a family's poverty status by comparing its annual income to a federal "poverty threshold" -- set at about three times the cost of a nutritionally adequate food budget and tailored to a family's size. The percentage of people falling below that threshold was deemed the "poverty rate." The threshold is adjusted each year to take into account changing prices.

But much more than prices has changed since 1965 -- and the government's poverty measures have failed to adapt to and recognize the new conditions. With more access to credit, greater income swings from year to year, and improved nutrition, housing and health care, the life of America's poor is radically different today. Unless the nation's basic poverty indicators take into account such new conditions, any efforts to effectively redress poverty in America are bound to fail.

To understand the problems with the official poverty rate, compare the America of 1973 to the America of 2001. In 2001, the country's per capita income was far higher than in 1973 -- according to the Census Bureau, roughly 60 percent higher -- and unemployment rates were lower. In 2001, only one in six adults lacked a high-school diploma; in 1973, two-fifths had not finished high school. And government anti-poverty spending was more than twice as high in 2001 as in 1973.

So, in a richer, more fully employed and better educated nation with a bigger safety net, shouldn't the poverty rate be lower? Wrong. The way the official rate is calculated, the fraction of Americans living below the poverty line was higher in 2001 (11.7 percent) than in 1973 (11.1 percent). For some reason, our official statisticians insist that America's best year for combating poverty -- ever -- was 1973. Go figure.

Indeed, since 1973, the official poverty rate has usually moved in the opposite, counterintuitive direction from other common-sense indicators of progress and poverty. When the rate of high school dropouts among America's adult population falls, the official poverty rate rises. When anti-poverty spending increases, so does poverty. And even when per capita income in the United States goes up, official poverty somehow increases, too.

Obviously, the official poverty rate isn't reflecting shifting living conditions in the United States. A wealth of evidence shows that those who are counted as poor today have dramatically higher living standards than their counterparts in the 1960s, when the poverty rate was originally devised:

Food and nutrition: In the early 1960s, the poorest fifth of American families were forced to devote nearly 30 percent of their expenditures to buying food; by 2004, the proportion was down to one-sixth of spending. Undernourishment and hunger were common among the most vulnerable elements of society 40 years ago; today, by contrast, obesity is the main nutritional problem facing adult Americans, rich and poor alike. And even children considered poor by official standards are better nourished today than in the 1960s. As recently as 1973, about 8 percent of low-income children surveyed by the Centers for Disease Control were judged underweight; by 2004 the figure had dropped below 5 percent. The prevalence of anemia among poorer American children likewise fell by more than half during those same years.

Housing: In 2001, only about 6 percent of the country's poor households lived in "crowded" dwellings (homes with more than one inhabitant per room), compared with more than 25 percent in 1970, according to the Census Bureau. Today's poor households are more likely to have telephone service and television sets than even non-poor households in 1970; they are much more likely to have central air conditioning than the typical American home of 1980, and almost as likely to have a dishwasher. Moreover, according to a Department of Energy survey in 2001, most poverty households have microwaves, VCRs or DVDs, and cable television -- conveniences unavailable in even the most affluent homes at the time the poverty rate measure was first released.

Autos and motor travel : In 1973, a majority of the households in the bottom fifth of income earners did not own a car. By 2003, nearly three-fourths of all poverty households had a car, truck or van, and a rising fraction owned two or more such vehicles.

Health care: For the affluent and the disadvantaged alike, life expectancy in America has risen significantly since the nation's poverty measures were first developed. The CDC's National Center for Health Statistics has found a broad improvement in national health conditions over the past four decades. Since 1965, for example, the U.S. infant mortality rate (the risk of death in the year after birth) has dropped by more than 70 percent. And regardless of the availability of health insurance, access to medical treatment has risen markedly for poorer Americans: Children in poor families are more likely today to have an annual medical visit or checkup with a doctor than even non-poor children did just 20 years ago.

Why does the official poverty rate fail to quantify the steady improvement in the living standards of America's poor? The answer lies in a simple mistake built into the poverty measure -- one that reflects a misunderstanding of how Americans live, spend and consume. Contradicting both economic theory and readily observable facts, the poverty rate assumes that a household's annual spending cannot, by definition, exceed its annual income.

Of course, this is not true, and economists have won Nobel prizes explaining why spending can far exceed income, particularly in advanced societies. For instance, when families are experiencing an unusually bad year, they may spend more than they earn if they see better prospects in the future. Similarly, a young worker may go into debt if she anticipates increases in her pay or benefits. Living standards, in other words, are linked to purchasing power -- and a family's purchasing power is not limited to its annual earnings.

Among low-income households in the United States, the gap between reported income and reported spending has widened gradually since the 1960s and now has taken on chasm-like dimensions. In the early 1960s, the poorest quarter of U.S. households spent 12 percent more than their annual incomes. In 1973, spending by America's poorest fifth surpassed their income by almost 40 percent. And in 2004, spending by the poorest fifth of American families exceeded income by a whopping 95 percent; in effect, spending was nearly twice as much as income.

These patterns might be due to easy access to credit, with many consumers maxing out their credit cards or engaging in other unsustainable borrowing. (Curiously, however, recent credit surveys suggest that the net worth of poorer Americans has been rising, not falling.)

Another important factor could be the increasing instability of American incomes. Scholars such as Jacob Hacker at Yale University and Robert Moffitt at Johns Hopkins University have noted that the income of American families is likely to bounce around much more today than it did three decades ago -- whether due to greater global competition, increasing rewards for education or other factors. Intensified swings, in turn, mean that more households may, in any given year, earn low incomes and be temporarily classified as living in poverty. But they continue to spend as they did before, anticipating that their incomes will bounce back. Such oscillations also mean that the incomes reported by families in annual surveys -- the backbone for the official poverty estimate -- are a steadily less accurate indicator of true living standards.

These criticisms of the official U.S. poverty rate should not be confused with indifference to the plight of America's disadvantaged and poor. Indeed, the opposite is true. In the richest society humanity has ever known, material deprivation still afflicts too many Americans. We cannot expect to make progress, however, without adequate and accurate information. Advocates of social and economic justice in the United States should be in the front ranks of those demanding more accurate assessments of U.S. poverty. Without a clearer sense of where we stand, how we got here and where we are headed, most initiatives aimed at reducing poverty in the United States will be needlessly ineffective.

eberstadt@aei.org
Nicholas Eberstadt is the Henry Wendt Scholar in political economy at the American Enterprise Institute.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/01/AR2006090101409.html

 

[Greed]

Does the EITC reduce the poverty rate?

Does the EITC reduce the poverty rate?

Here is how Wikipedia describes the Earned Income Tax Credit:

The United States federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is a refundable tax credit that reduces or eliminates the taxes that low-income working people pay (such as payroll taxes) and also frequently operates as a wage subsidy for low-income workers. Enacted in 1975, the then very small EITC was expanded in 1986, 1990, 1993, and 2001 with each major tax bill, regardless of whether the tax bill in general raised taxes (1990), lowered taxes (2001), or eliminated other deductions and credits (1986). Today, the EITC is one of the largest anti-poverty tools in the United States.​

As far as I can tell, all of this is correct, except the last sentence about the EITC being an anti-poverty tool. Why isn't that last part correct? Because the Census omits the income from the EITC when computing the poverty rate. As a program to reduce measured poverty, the program is, by assumption, doomed to failure.

Of course, this is not really a problem with the EITC but, rather, a problem with the measured poverty rate. It makes no sense to evaluate poverty with a statistic that ignores the effects of one of the largest and most rapidly growing anti-poverty tools we have. But that is what the official statistics do.

The EITC is one reason why many low-income families consume more than they earn (a fact pointed out in the previous post). Government policymakers need to take a long, hard look at how poverty is measured. Meanwhile, journalists need to report the official statistics with a healthy dose of caveats.

http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/09/does-eitc-reduce-poverty-rate.html

 

[GET YOU HOT]

Good Post G^^^

 

[Greed]

In America, The Poor Don't Work

September 10, 2008
In America, The Poor Don't Work
Steven Malanga

Declaring that it’s becoming “easier to fall into poverty” in America, Barack Obama has laid out an anti-poverty agenda that includes raising the minimum wage, increasing tax credits for low-income wage earners, and enacting legislation to make it easier for workers to start unions.

John McCain would attack poverty by cutting taxes to stimulate the economy and boost opportunity throughout the workforce.

Although their agendas are starkly different, both men make the same fundamental mistake. They declare that labor-force solutions, like higher wages or creating better jobs, will significantly reduce poverty America. But that won’t happen because the vast majority of the impoverished in America don’t work and wouldn’t even if we raised wages or created more jobs. They are in poverty because of social or physical problems or choices in life they’ve made which make it difficult or impossible for them to work. Some have simply chosen not to work. It’s not that our economy doesn’t work for most of the poor, but that most of the poor don’t work.

Obama and McCain can be excused for not addressing poverty’s real causes because rarely anyone else in public life ever does, including not only politicians but most reporters and editors who regularly cover the issue. When the Census Bureau released its latest figures on poverty in late August, on the day before Obama addressed the Democratic National Convention, the press’s reaction was superficial and predictable: “Poverty Rate Reflects Stalled Economy,” began a piece on National Public Radio, even though a close look at economic cycles over the last 35 years shows that poverty rates only change slightly when the economy turns up, or down.

But digging deeper into the layers of data that Census provided in its latest reports would be revealing—I would dare say startling—for the average American. For instance, what the latest data show is that of the 7.6 million families in poverty in America, more than 80 percent did not contain an adult who worked full time in the past year. In fact, in more than half of families in poverty the householder did not work at all in the last year. The problem was especially acute among single-parent families headed by women, which make up 19 percent of American families but 55 percent of all families in poverty. In only 17 percent of those impoverished families is the household head working full time. Still, even that is better than before welfare reform set time limits on public assistance in 1996. Back in the early 1990s, for instance, only 9 percent of all poor women who headed households worked.

It’s especially revealing to see why the poor don’t work. In this latest study, Census asked non-working impoverished adults between the ages of 16 and 64 why they are out of the workforce. Only 6 percent said it was because they could not find work. By contrast, 26 percent said they didn’t work because of family commitments, 27 percent said they were in school, 32 percent said they were ill, and 9 percent said they had retired. Whatever their individual problems or circumstances, in other words, a shrinking economy, or wage levels that are too low, or the decline of unions have little to do with the poverty of most of these people.

That the poor don’t work very much gets left out of all sorts of public policy debates, including those on the growing gap between the rich and the poor. A recent graph accompanying an Economic View column in the New York Times, for instance, showed that households in the lowest economic quintile make far greater income gains during Democratic administrations, while the top five percent of households do better under Republican presidents. The graph and accompanying commentary suggested that Democratic presidents are somehow producing more economic opportunity for those at the bottom of the economic scale, but as the Census numbers show, that’s just nonsense. According to the latest Census figures, 60 percent of families in the lowest quintile in America do not contain a single adult earner. When their income surges, it is often because Washington is increasing transfer payments to the poor, not because economic opportunity is rising.

By contrast, the members of America’s richest households are working like never before. About 76 percent of all families in the top 5 percent of household income contain two or more workers, Census data show, and the percentage of families with multiple workers increases as household income increases. As sociologist Dalton Conley recently wrote in the New York Times, “Today, the more we earn, the more we work.”

Until we address the causes of poverty frankly instead of resorting to demagogy about the rich and the poor, we won’t begin to make serious reductions in poverty. Social scientists, for instance, have understood for years now that one of the greatest problems we face in reducing poverty is the rise of single-parent households. As a 2006 paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research noted, “Changes in family structure--notably a doubling of the percent of families headed by a single woman--can account for … more than the entire rise in the poverty rate” from 1980 to today.

And the problem is only getting worse. More than one-third of all births in America today are to unmarried women, and nearly half of them are already in poverty, meaning their children are being born directly into poverty themselves. Many of these women do not have a high school education, so the prospects that they can find anything but entry level work are grim. And given what social science now tells us about children raised without a father—that they are far more likely than kids raised in two-parent families to drop out of school, to wind up on welfare, and in the case of girls to become unwed mothers themselves— the likelihood of current levels of poverty persisting no matter how many new jobs we create is enormous.

Finding solutions to these problems is far more complicated and politically risky than offering palliatives about minimum wage hikes or tax cuts. To address the issue of the more than 80 percent of poor families where no one works full time requires figuring out how to dissuade poor girls without a high school education from having children by a man who won’t marry and support them. It also requires doing a much better job helping make ex-convicts--the 700,000 or so mostly men who leave prison each year--more employable. And it requires finding more successful ways of helping alcoholics and drug addicts—who make up a sizeable portion of those who say they can’t work because they are ill—get straight and stay clean.

These are difficult problems, but there are pockets of innovation going on around the country which offer hope. We rarely hear about them, however, because our candidates and the press are too busy telling us that our economy is somehow failing the poor.

Steven Malanga is an editor for RealClearMarkets and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute

http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2008/09/in_america_the_poor_dont_work.html

 

[thoughtone]

^^^^^^^^

 

[muckraker10021]

Corporate Profits Are At An All-Time High
Wages Are At An All-Time Low
"In short, our current system and philosophy is creating a
country of a few million overlords and 300+ million serfs"

June 22, 2012

http://www.businessinsider.com/corp...me-high-wages-just-hit-an-all-time-low-2012-6

<img src="http://i.minus.com/iF2OUhUe7Zc42.png" width="550">
Corporate profits is red line
Wages is the blue line

<font face="arial black" size="4" color="#d90000">
<br><strong>Vital Statistics - June 2012</strong></font><font size="3" color="#000000" face="arial unicode ms, verdana">

<br>US poverty (less than $22,314 for a family of four): 46 million people, 15.1 percent of population.
<br>Children in poverty: <a href="http://www.childrensdefense.org/policy-priorities/ending-child-poverty/index.html#hard_times">16.4 million</a>, <a href="http://www.clasp.org/issues/did_you_know?type=child_care_and_early_education&amp;id=0023">22 percent</a> of all children, including 39 percent of African-American children and 35 percent of Latino children.
<br>Number of poor children receiving cash aid: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/us/welfare-limits-left-poor-adrift-as-recession-hit.html?pagewanted=1&amp;_r=1&amp;hp">one in five</a>.
<br>Poverty rate for people in female-headed families: <a href="http://www.legalmomentum.org/our-work/women-and-poverty/single-parents.html">42 percent</a>.
<br>Single mothers with incomes under $25,000: <a href="http://www.legalmomentum.org/our-work/women-and-poverty/resources--publications/single-mothers-snapshot.pdf">50 percent</a>.
<br>Single mothers working: <a href="http://www.legalmomentum.org/our-work/women-and-poverty/resources--publications/single-mothers-snapshot.pdf">67 percent</a>.
<br>Deep poverty (less than $11,157 for a family of four): <a href="http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&amp;id=3580">20.5 million people</a>, 6.7 percent of population. Up from 12.6 million in 2000.
<br>Increase in deep poverty, 1976–2010: doubled—3.3 percent of population to 6.7 percent.
<br>Americans with no income other than food stamps: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/us/03foodstamps.html?pagewanted=all">6 million</a>, 2 percent of population.
<br>Twice the poverty level (less than $44,628 for a family of four): 103 million people, roughly 1 in 3 Americans.
<br>Families receiving cash assistance, 1996: <a href="http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&amp;id=3700">68</a> for every 100 families living in poverty.
<br>Families receiving cash assistance, 2010: <a href="http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&amp;id=3700">27</a> for every 100 families living in poverty.
<br>Impact of public policy, 2010: without government assistance, <a href="http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&amp;id=3610">poverty would have been twice as high</a>—nearly 30 percent of population.</font>

<hr noshade color="#660033" size="8"></hr>

<hr noshade color="#0000FF" size="4"></hr>

The oligarchs plan for America is to have as many people
as possible scrambling for survival as you see in the video below.



<hr noshade color="#0000FF" size="4"></hr>