Blessed are the poor because they are so numerous, with more created everyday in the US. One out of six americans is now living in poverty, according to the census bureau, hitting a record of more than 46 million.
The Census Bureau's annual report on income, poverty and health insurance coverage said the national poverty rate climbed for a third consecutive year to 15.1 percent in 2010 as the economy struggled to recover from the recession that began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009.
That marked a 0.8 percent increase from 2009, when there were 43.6 million Americans living in poverty.
The number of poor Americans in 2010 was the largest in the 52 years that the Census Bureau has been publishing poverty estimates, the report said, while the poverty rate was the highest since 1993.
The specter of economic deterioration also afflicted working Americans who saw their median income decline 2.3 percent to an annual $49,445.
About 1.5 million fewer Americans were covered by employer-sponsored health insurance plans, while the number of people covered by government health insurance increased by nearly 2 million.
All told, the number of Americans with no health insurance hovered at 49.9 million, up slightly from 49 million in 2010.
Of 34 countries in the developing world tracked, only Chile, Israel and Mexico have higher poverty rates.
I wanted to snark that LBJ's war on poverty worked about as well as Nixon's war on drugs and Bush's war on terror. Only the statistics show that the anti-poverty efforts did work, until Reagan started the evisceration of the social welfare network set up by Johnson (and Nixon!), when anti-worker legislation in the 1980's began eroding wages and globalization began exporting jobs of all sorts. The last decade has seen a systematic looting of assets and incomes from average americans by rentier capitalists who hire lobbyists to bribe lawmakers to skew laws and taxes to their advantage, causing a higher percentage of the created wealth of this country to flow their way. Hope they enjoy flying around in their private jets, because at some point, when they land, they will be facing a mob of sans coulottes.
(cross posted at Possible Experience)