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Poverty Rate Remains Steady While Income Inequality Grows
The number of people living in poverty is the highest the Census Bureau has ever recorded, but when will rhetoric give way to results?
Theresa Riley, Bill Moyers & Company
Homeless people line up in Franklin Park in downtown Washington to receive food and clothing from the congregation of Greater Saint John Church of Upper Marlboro, Md., Saturday, May 19, 2012. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
(September 13, 2012) A new census report shows that the middle class is still suffering the impact of the financial crisis that started four years ago this week. Although poverty rates remained steady from 2010 to 2011, the news wasn’t good. The number of people living in poverty — 46.2 million — is the highest ever recorded in the 53 years the Census Bureau has been tracking it.
Perhaps most troubling is the fact that statistics like one in four children under the age of 6 live are living in poverty isn’t headline news, as Hannah Matthews, the director of child care and early education at CLASP, writes on the Huffington Post:
As is tradition on ‘poverty day,’ journalists, advocates, and politicians alike will express outrage for the dismal poverty statistics. In the midst of a presidential campaign that has left the needs of the very poor largely unspoken, both candidates may make reference to the need to do more for those at the bottom of the income scale.
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