30% Of Americans Rapidly Approaching Poverty or are Already There

America Increasingly Looks Like A Developing Nation As 30% Of Americans Rapidly Approach Poverty, Or Are Already There

Vincent Fernando | Jan. 25, 2010

A shocking report from Brookings exposes just how massive America's poverty problem is. While substantial reductions in poverty were made during the 1990's, America's poor have been rocked by the dual economic downturns since 2000.

The result is that poverty grew at twice the rate of U.S. population growth from 2000 - 2008, and now encompasses 39.1 million Americans.



If one were to expand the definition of poverty to merely 'poor' (yet still very poor), then a eye-popping 30% of the nation lives no higher than twice the poverty base line.

Brookings: In 2008, 91.6 million people—more than 30 percent of the nation’s population—fell below 200 percent of the federal poverty level. More individuals lived in families with incomes between 100 and 200 percent of poverty line (52.5 million) than below the poverty line (39.1 million) in 2008. Between 2000 and 2008, large suburbs saw the fastest growing low-income populations across community types and the greatest uptick in the share of the population living under 200 percent of poverty.

Here's where it gets even more ridiculous -- If you break down the data to individual areas, then there's at least ten U.S. cities with poverty rates of around 30%. Moreover, Brookings latest research highlights how poverty has been getting worse especially fast in the suburbs, thus the U.S. is faced with the challenges of suburban poverty like never before:



Finally, this bad news has likely become far worse already. This research doesn't include 2009 since full data hasn't come out yet. When it does, expect a huge up-tick in poverty rates given since that's when the real brunt of the recent crisis hit 'Main St.'.

Unfortunately, our regression analyses suggest that these metro areas are not likely to see such decreases in 2009, a year in which no metro area proved exempt from increased unemployment rates. Although the Census will not officially release poverty rates for 2009 until fall of next year, job losses alone foretell a substantially larger increase in the metropolitan poverty rate than the 0.3 percent reported from 2007 to 2008, when unemployment increases were just beginning to accelerate.

http://www.businessinsider.com/30-of-america-approaching-poverty-2010-1

Anybody listening?

And they don't listen to the homeless or poor because they don't contribute to their campaign fund.

Clinton included.

And the US isn't being systematically dismantled in a day.

It's taken decades of Republicans and Democrats working together to get to where we are. Left vs. Right is a distraction to keep us deflected from the fact that the majority of both are working for the corporate and economic terrorists who will desolate anything in their quest for ludicrous profits.

EDIT: Even though the political lines have been energized and polarized, I still think that Leftist ideologies are generally fundamentally more appealing to me than Right/Conservative viewpoints.

so I just don't think of him as being on the LEFT.

really, the icing on the cake? It is the "death blow" to the rest of our citizenry (except the wealthy). Obama has proven to be a major part of the elitist takeover of what is left of America. The Supremes helped a lot.

3/10 places on the "suburbs" list.

This just cannot keep up. It is ugly, and going to get much uglier....

Hard to imagine how a family can live on that.

Came across a chart at http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_pop_bel_pov_lin-economy-population-below-poverty-line
that says the poverty rate in the US is higher than that in Croatia, Thailand, The Bahamas, China, Libya, Tunisia, Malaysia, etc.
Don't know how accurate that is.

We have a daughter-in-law without insurance that has diabetes and threw a blood clot in her leg during her pregnancy. The cost of saving her leg from amputation from venous damage from that clot is an ongoing money drain, as is her brittle diabetes which has gotten her into the hospital for diabetic ketoacidosis numerous times.

My daughter's 2-year-old has Goldenhars' Syndrome, a birth defect that so far has required surgery for her eyes and constant doctors visits and hopefully won't require abdominal surgery or we'll really be screwed. And my two children have fairly decent jobs, but no insurance. They're just the regular type Americans that live paycheck to paycheck. We've dicked around with the idea of actually getting my son and his wife divorced so that she can qualify to get some kind of public health care from the University Hospital in San Antonio since they have an indigent program. I got a notice from our utility company that our bill is overdue and if my daughter-in-law's leg starts to swell up again (which it does every few months or so, and it's back to hyperbaric treatments), we are going to be so screwed. This is why this health care reform business by our Democratic congress and president has gotten me in so much trouble with my fellow DUer's with my hateful rants. Yeah. I hate these bastards. And not just because they're keeping me from taking a cruise to the Bahamas every year.

We are all just an illness away from financial ruin really.

I have 2 elderly parents (father and mother in law) who have health issues. One has leukemia and doing OK but the costs are ruinous and not covered by insurance. Both these parents would prefer be in assisted living, but the sale of their houses would not bring much for that, so they eke it out alone in their own small homes counting themselves lucky by comparison. It's a fragile situation. One fall or mishap and they will be living with us and we don't have the means to support them or the time to nurse them.

This does not have to be. (I think it's OK to hate bastards).

Being willing to work hard and in return getting the near guarantee of a middle-class lifestyle has been part of the social contract. Now that's gone along with the permanent loss of class status for millions of Americans.

The worst part of it is I know how good Republicans are at harnessing populist anger without any sense of irony. I wonder how many of these people are going to go running into the Republicans arms in the next election.

"I wonder how many of these people are going to go running into the Republicans arms in the next election."

As usual, the 30% who art the most faithful of the most faithful will long for the good old hey days of bush/cheney and reflexively/obediently blame the traitorous evil unpatriotic progressives for their growing sense of discomfort. Power to the corporations!

Man, you got that right! Gingrich got none of his Contract with America accomplished, but everyone seems to have forgotten the massive fail that was the last Republican Revolution.

is nauseating. But people have such short memories for the truth.

for more of the same. They seem to have no clue how we got into this mess.

were directed to Republican strongholds. Blue states and cities were
economically discriminated against. I do believe the blowback from
that is reflected here.

And unfortunately, no- not many in America are listening.