Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Poverty Increasing in New World Order Era America
WASHINGTON - Even with a robust economy that was adding jobs last year, the number of Americans who fell into poverty rose to 37 million - up 1.1 million from 2003 - according to Census Bureau figures released Tuesday. [Jobs paying what? -SY]
It marks the fourth straight increase in the government's annual poverty measure.
The Census Bureau also said household income remained flat, and that the number of people without health insurance edged up by about 800,000 to 45.8 million people.
"I was surprised," said Sheldon Danziger, co-director of the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan. "I thought things would have turned around by now."
While disappointed, the Bush Administration - which has not seen a decline in poverty numbers since the president took office - said it was not surprised by the new statistics.
Commerce Department spokeswoman E.R. Anderson said they mirror a trend in the '80s and '90s in which unemployment peaks were followed by peaks in poverty and then by a decline in the poverty numbers the next year.
"We hope this is it, that this is the last gasp of indicators for the recession," she said.
Democrats seized on the numbers as proof the nation is headed in the wrong direction.
"America should be showing true leadership on the great moral issues of our time - like poverty - instead of allowing these situations to get worse," said John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator and Democratic vice presidential candidate. He has started a poverty center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. [Edwards is not poor or poorly connected ~SY.]
Overall, the nation's poverty rate rose to 12.7 percent of the population last year. Of the 37 million living below the poverty level, close to a third were children.
The last decline in overall poverty was in 2000, during the Clinton administration, when 31.3 million people lived under the threshold. Since then, the numbers of people in poverty has increased steadily from 32.9 million in 2001, when the economy slipped into recession, to 35.8 million in 2003.