The map above, from the Census Bureau, is worth a thousand words about poverty in the United States. What the map doesn't tell you is how this relates to past years, and as you might have guessed based on other recent reports from the Census, 2010 saw decline. Not declining poverty rates—declining economic circumstances for working Americans.
According to the American Community Survey Briefs on poverty for 2009 and 2010 (PDF), from which the map is drawn, in 32 states, both the number and the percentage of people living in poverty increased, while not a single state saw a statistically significant decline in either figure. The percentage of people living just above the poverty level and in deep poverty, at half the poverty level, also increased.
For all their talk about austerity, what the majority of politicians and pundits don't seem to begin to get is that a great many Americans are already practicing the most stringent kind of austerity.