Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Poor Kids: This is America



Here's the reax of Robert Greenstein, the executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, to the new Census Bureau data on poverty and income levels:

The new Census figures are disappointing for the fifth year of an economic recovery -- showing a significant decline in poverty for people over 65 but no significant decline in poverty for children or adults aged 18 to 64, and only a modest improvement in median income. In 2006, the poverty rate remained higher, and median income for non-elderly households remained $1,300 lower, than in 2001, when the last recession hit bottom. It is virtually unprecedented for poverty to be higher and the income of working-age households lower in the fifth year of a recovery than in the last year of the previous recession.

The new figures are the latest evidence that the economic growth of the past few years has been very uneven, with the gains concentrated among the highest-income Americans. Too many low- and middle-income families are not sharing in the gains. These figures are inconsistent with claims that the policies of recent years have produced an outstanding economic track record.


The new stats show that the number of uninsured Americans went up by 2.2 million, and this figures includes 600,000 children. Moreover, 36.5 million Americans were poor in 2006, according to the Census Bureau info--a level statistically no different from 2005. The poverty rate for children (17.4 percent) was higher than that of adults (10.8 percent). This is America.

Posted by David Corn at August 28, 2007 06:19 PM

2 comments:

capt said...

New Thread

Mookie said...

This is what happens in free market global capitalism. We think we have it bad here, but the folks that make all our cheap plastic crap are suffering far worse than we are.