A story about the poverty rate declining significantly was just posted over at yahoo news.
http://news.yahoo.com/...
At first blush, you get the impression, especially since we are past the mid-point of 2007, that poverty has taken a sharp drop this year and things must be looking up. But I found this especially important to note.
The Census Bureau reported Tuesday that 36.5 million Americans, or 12.3 percent — were living in poverty last year. That's down from 12.6 percent in 2005.
Indeed, a drop from 12.6 to 12.3 percent is significant, but as usual, once must take this value into context. First of all, they are last year's numbers. 2006 was an election year and as always the federal government was pumping extraordinary amounts of money into the economy. With the current credit crisis far, far away, consumers at all income levels were expanding the limits of thier credit use well beyond the asset limits that should have constrained normal spending. This falsely boosted wages at all income levels, skewing income data and ultimately poverty rate data.
Now back to my point about this being LAST YEAR'S poverty data.
The poverty numbers are good economic news at a time when financial markets have been rattled by a slumping housing market. However, the numbers released Tuesday represent economic conditions from a year ago.
The poverty level is the official measure used to decide eligibility for federal health, housing, nutrition and child care benefits. It differs by family size and makeup. For a family of four with two children, for example, the poverty level is $20,444. The poverty rate — the percentage of people living below poverty — helps shape the debate on the health of the nation's economy.
It seems to me a very odd thing to try and use this one poverty metric to try and judge "the health of the nation's economy".
Now being an Edwards supporter, I take offense to this remark. Now I didn't write this diary because I felt this story was yet another traditional media swipe at Edwards but read this quote.
"The poor are politically mute," said Larry Jacobs, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota. "What rational politician would listen to the poor? They don't vote, they don't write checks, why care?"
Democrat John Edwards has made fighting poverty a centerpiece of his campaign. But, Jacobs noted, "He's struggling to raise money and he's lagging in the polls."
It is a truism that the poor are the least likely to participate although conservatives will argue till they are blue in the face that the reason that there is still welfare is because all those welfare moms keep voting Democratic. Myths aside, the fate of the poor ultimately portends our own fate.
But this quote deserves a diary all it's own.
The share of Americans without health insurance hit 15.8 percent last year, up from 15.3 percent the previous year. Johnson said the decrease was mostly fueled by a decline in employer-provided health coverage.
"It affects people in the middle, and it affects corporations," Brodkin said. "Especially those who compete globally, they are really hurting because they have to compete with companies that don't have huge health insurance bills for their labor force."
This fact will push people into poverty faster than any deline in wages, housing deflation, credit crunch or other economic calamity could ever cause. Bottom line is that I firmly believe that poverty is on the increase in America. The cost of living has risen at an extraordinary pace and any massaging of the unemployment rate or wages or productivity can't mask the facts of reality. There is a reason that housing foreclosures have gone from 13 a month to 100 a month in Los Angeles from 2006 to 2007. That reason is a false sense of reality to a chronic and willful ignorance of the everyday suffering of the majority of Americans.
I will close with the articles last comments.
Danziger said low unemployment in 2006 helped lower the poverty rate. But, he noted, the rate was slow to drop despite five years of economic growth.
"For three decades we have had an economy where workers with a high school diploma or less have hardly kept up with inflation," Danziger said.
Low-wage workers have been hurt by the nation's declining manufacturing sector, which has lost more than 3 million jobs since Bush took office.
The rate was slow to drop, hardly kept up with inflation and 3 million jobs lost, this all during a period of recovery. We leave behind those of us least fortunate, we leave behind America.