McClatchy newspapers today reported that extreme poverty in the United States has reached a 32-year high. In every area measured, the poor have lost ground rapidly since 2000.
In fact, the McClatchy analysis found that the number of extremely poor grew by 26% between 2000 and 2005, outpacing the growth of the overall population of people living in poverty by a whopping 56%.
The plight of the severely poor is a distressing sidebar to an unusual economic expansion. Worker productivity has increased significantly since the brief recession of 2001, but wages and job growth have lagged. At the same time, the share of national income going to corporate profits has dwarfed the amount going to wages and salaries. That helps explain why the median household income for working-age families, adjusted for inflation, has fallen for five straight years.Remind me again - weren't the Bush tax cuts supposed to ameliorate these problems, because a rising tide lifts all boats? Instead, the poor have gotten poorer and the rich have gotten richer, and indeed the twain shant meet.
These and other factors have helped push 43 percent of the nation’s 37 million poor people into deep poverty — the highest rate since at least 1975.
The share of Americans in deep poverty has climbed slowly but steadily in the last three decades. But since 2000, the number of severely poor has grown “more than any other segment of the population,” according to a recent study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
“That was the exact opposite of what we anticipated when we began,” said Steven Woolf of Virginia Commonwealth University, who co-wrote the study. “We’re not seeing as much moderate poverty as a proportion of the population. What we’re seeing is a dramatic growth of severe poverty.”
