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•The number of people in poverty in 2010 (46.2 million) is the largest number in the 52 years for which poverty estimates have been published.

•Between 2009 and 2010, the poverty rate increased for children under age 18 (from 20.7 percent to 22.0 percent) and people aged 18 to 64 (from 12.9 percent to 13.7 percent), but was not statistically different for people aged 65 and older (9.0 percent).

•This was the third consecutive annual increase in the poverty rate. Since 2007, the poverty rate has increased by 2.6 percentage points, from 12.5 percent to 15.1 percent. http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/about/overview/index.html COURSE we're not at the point we were at during the Great Depression (yet!), when 60% of people were living below the poverty line. But that's not at all what I wrote. What I wrote is correct. Given there are no specific statistics available for poverty during the Great Depression, we can only go on the years since then, but that's sufficient to illustrate the point.

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A study from Indiana University, released on Wednesday, says the number of Americans living below the poverty line surged by 27% since the beginning of what it calls the "Great Recession" in 2006, driving 10 million more people into poverty.

The report warns that the numbers will continue to rise, because although the recession is technically over, its continued impact on cuts to welfare budgets and the quality of new, often poorly paid, jobs can be expected to force many more people in to poverty. It is also difficult for those already under water to get back up again.

The white paper, drafted by the university's school of public and environmental affairs, which is among the best ranked schools of its kind in the US, says that six years ago, 36.5 million Americans fell below the poverty line. By 2010, the number of people living in poverty rose to 46.2 million and continued to grow over the past year.

"The Great Recession has left behind the largest number of long-term unemployed people since records were first kept in 1948.

The latest census data shows that nearly one in two of the US's 300 million citizens are now officially classified as having a low income or living in poverty. One in five families earns less than $15,000 a year.

The Indiana University study says that the numbers of people falling into poverty is also likely to grow because of severe cuts to state and federal welfare budgets.

"The states by their constitutions all have to have a balanced budget each year. A lot of states are already in the process of cutting back their safety net programmes at the same time that poverty is increasing," said Graham. "Their needs are going up but the programmes are receiving less support. It's going to continue because the revenues of state governments are not increasing as rapidly as is needed and the federal government will be under a lot of pressure because of its large deficit to decrease funding given to the states."

The report warns that the situation is likely to become even worse if the long-term unemployed lose their jobless benefits. Congress extended them for two months at the end of the year, but it is unlikely they will be continued indefinitely.

Among the most severely affected states are Florida, Nevada and Arizona, which have been particularly badly hit by the housing foreclosure crisis, and Michigan and Ohio, which have seen the collapse of traditional manufacturing.

Minorities are among the hardest hit. More than one in four African Americans and Hispanics is officially recorded as living in poverty. About one in 10 white Americans fall below the poverty line. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jan/11/poverty-america-likely-
worse-report we were up to 46.2 as of the end of 2010. And we can revise my original statement to the "largest number of long-term unemployed people since records were first kept in 1948". That's accurate, according to the study--and I found the same numbers in other studies.

Oh, by the way, it also states:

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The report says that the situation would have been much worse had it not been for the Obama administration's 2009 federal stimulus package, which increased child health insurance for poorer families, and cut taxes for low income workers.

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Just as an afterthought.

Also:

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The number of families living on $2 or less per person per day for at least a month in the USA has more than doubled in 15 years to 1.46 million. http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-02-23/extreme-poverty-i
ncrease/53227386/1 is, of course, "for at least a month", so it's not an accurate measure of long-term poverty, but it's a pretty shocking statistic nonetheless. And all these figures are WITH government assistance; I wonder what they'd be without it, or even without whatever the Republicans want to cut?

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Extreme poverty in US has more than doubled since 1996

A policy brief recently issued by the National Poverty Center (NPC) reveals that the number of households in the US living on less than $2 a day per person has increased by 130 percent since 1996, from 636,000 to some 1.46 million today.

This means that some 4 million people in “the richest country on earth” (according to US capitalism’s apologists) are surviving on less than $60 a month each, i.e., essentially on no income whatsoever.

The policy brief, authored by H. Luke Shaefer, University of Michigan, School of Social Work, and Kathryn Edin, Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government, studies the results of the fifteen years since the 1996 “welfare reform” signed into law by President Bill Clinton, which fatally slashed the social safety net.

“This reform,” the authors comment, “has been followed by a dramatic decline in cash assistance caseloads, from an average of 12.3 million recipients per month in 1996 to 4.4 million in June 2011; only 1.1 million of these beneficiaries are adults.

“Thus, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, while millions of American parents continue to experience long spells of unemployment, they have little access to means-tested income support programs. Has this produced a new group of American poor: households with children living on virtually no income?”

The answer is yes.

In studying the most deprived in the US, the policy brief, whether pointedly or not, explains that the researchers developed “a definition based on one of the World Bank’s main indicators of global poverty, meant to measure poverty in developing nations.” They adopt the World Bank’s standard for determining the poorest of the global poor, subsistence on $2 a day or less.

The study draws data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) collected by the US Census Bureau from sample households every four months. The most recent data comes from the beginning of 2011.

In passing, the study notes that participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as the Food Stamp Program, has increased from an average of 25.5 million recipients per month in 1996 to 45.2 million in June 2011, a 77 percent increase in a decade and a half. http://wsws.org/articles/2012/feb2012/pove-f25.shtml and others

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The economic downturn began before Obama took office. Also, poverty experts such as Sheldon Danziger, director of the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan, say that more Americans would have been forced into poverty without the 2009 federal stimulus plan, championed by Obama, which included billions of dollars for programs that help low-income Americans such as Medicaid and unemployment insurance.

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