The article below is yet another negative article on Rick Perry’s Texas that the corporate controlled media is seizing on. This is the same Rick Perry whose Texas was described as the Conservative wonder.
That the Mainstream Media could make such an about face with a straight face should give every American pause. After all, during the times he was the media darling, many Texans were tweeting, blogging and vlogging the sad state of the real Texas economy as it affects its middle class.
Poverty grows in Rick Perry’s Texas
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Texas Governor Rick Perry likes to brag that his state is an economic powerhouse.
But don’t tell that to the nearly one in five Texans who are living below the poverty line.
While it’s true that Texas is responsible for 40% of the jobs added in the U.S. over the past two years, its poverty rate also grew faster than the national average in 2010.
Texas ranks 6th in terms of people living in poverty. Some 18.4% of Texans were impoverished in 2010, up from 17.3% a year earlier, according to Census Bureau datareleased this week. The national average is 15.1%.
And being poor in Texas isn’t easy. The state has one of the lowest rates of spending on its citizens per capita and the highest share of those lacking health insurance. It doesn’t provide a lot of support services to those in need: Relatively few collect food stamps and qualifying for cash assistance is particularly tough.
"There are two tiers in Texas," said Miguel Ferguson, associate professor of social work at University of Texas at Austin. "There are parts of Texas that are doing well. And there is a tremendous number of Texans, more than Perry has ever wanted to acknowledge, that are doing very, very poorly."
Perry, for his part, believes that creating jobs is the best way to help every Texan. The state is doing "everything we can to ensure that every Texan who wants a job has one," a spokeswoman for the governor said.
A combination of demographic and economic factors contribute to the high poverty rate in Texas, where many families, particularly in the southern swath, live in ramshackle housing with no utilities or indoor plumbing.
More than half the state are minorities, many of them Hispanic. This population often has lower levels of education, making it harder for them to escape poverty, said Steve Murdock, sociology professor at Rice University. And the state’s population is younger and the families there larger, on average, which also puts them at greater risk of being poor.
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