This report is disheartening not because it so devastating to American families but because the data shows how badly our economic system has performed for middleclass Americans for the last 30 years. That employers no longer able or willing to provide health insurance & that had our safety net not been there so many millions more would have been poverty stricken lends me to question the sanity of Americans who still think healthcare reform is wrong. It lends me to question the morality of those who refuse to see the structural problems in our economic system that the titans of finance are so trying to protect because it benefits the few who believe themselves entitled.
I write about this in my book. Please give it a read.
Book Title: As I See It: Class Warfare: The Only Resort To Right Wing Doom
ISBN: 1453608168
Amazon(Paperback): http://amzn.to/dt72c7
Amazon(Kindle): http://amzn.to/9uFIrV
Book Webpage: http://bit.ly/9sJpA1
Arthur Delaney
arthur@huffingtonpost.com | HuffPost ReportingThe poverty rate rose to 14.3 percent during 2009 from 13.2 percent the previous year as household income stayed flat and the number of people without health insurance reached its highest level since such data has been collected, the government announced Thursday.
The first year of Barack Obama’s presidency started with 700,000 people losing their jobs each month and sensational reports of formerly middle-class families crowding tent cities across the country. The tent cities, it turned out, were there before the recession started, but the rise in poverty was real: For working age people between 18 and 64, 2009 saw the highest poverty rate — 12.9 percent — since 1965.
The overall rate is the highest since 1994. Some poverty watchers had expected the poverty rate to jump as high as 15 percent.
"Today’s news is sobering, showing that 2009 was a year with increased poverty and rising numbers of uninsured Americans," said Rebecca Blank, the Commerce Department’s undersecretary for economic affairs. "There is one primary reason for the fact that poverty did not rise and median income did not fall as much as the rise in the unemployment rate would suggest: government assistance that moderated the effect of the recession on American families. Among the elderly, poverty actually fell, largely because of increased Social Security payments. Among working adults, expanded receipt of unemployment insurance helped cushion the affects of lost hours and jobs."
In 2009, 43.6 million people lived in poverty, up from 39.8 million in 2008, according to to the Census Bureau’s annual Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage report. The poverty threshold for a family of four is an annual household income of $21,954. Household incomes, surprisingly, did not see a statistically significant change last year, but have declined 4.2 percent since the start of the recession.
