The real economy: Poverty

Popular Resistance - America’s wealth grew by 60 percent in the past six years, by over $30 trillion. In approximately the same time, the number of homeless children has also grown by 60 percent.

... The U.S. has one of the highest relative child poverty rates in the developed world. As UNICEF reports, “[Children's] material well-being is highest in the Netherlands and in the four Nordic countries and lowest in Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and the United States.”

Over half of public school students are poor enough to qualify for lunch subsidies, and almost half of black children under the age of six are living in poverty.

Nearly half of all food stamp recipients are children, and they averaged about $5 a day for their meals before the 2014 farm bill cut $8.6 billion (over the next ten years) from the food stamp program.

In 2007 about 12 of every 100 kids were on food stamps. Today it’s 20 of every 100.

Activist Post -One recent survey discovered that about 22 percent of all Americans have had to turn to a church food panty for assistance.

Center on Budget & Policy Priorities - Roughly 1 million of the nation’s poorest people will be cut off SNAP (formerly known as the Food Stamp Program) over the course of 2016, due to the return in many areas of a three-month limit on SNAP benefits for unemployed adults aged 18-50 who aren’t disabled or raising minor children. These individuals will lose their food assistance benefits after three months regardless of how hard they are looking for work.

One in five young adults – ages 18 to 34 years old – live in poverty, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Up from one in seven (8.4 million people) in 1980.

Common Dreams - According to the United States Conference of Mayors' annual Hunger and Homelessness Survey, 71 percent of the 25 cities surveyed saw an increase in requests for emergency food assistance—a majority of those coming from families. Low wages were the biggest cause of hunger among those cities, followed by poverty, unemployment, and high living costs...

More than 80 percent of emergency kitchens had to slash the amount of food an individual could take in one visit or per meal. Of the 25 cities surveyed, 21 said they expected food needs to increase in the next year.

One recent study finds that our nation’s poverty rate would have dropped by 20 percent between 1980 and 2004 if not for mass incarceration and the subsequent criminal records that haunt people for years after they have paid their debt to society

Greg Kaufmann, Moyers & Company 

People in the US experiencing poverty by age 65: Roughly half
Jobs in the US paying less than $34,000 a year: 50 percent
Jobs in the US paying below the poverty line for a family of four, less than $23,000 annually: 25 percent
Poverty-level wages, 2011: 28 percent of workers
Number of homeless children in US public schools: 1,168,354

Greg Kaufmann, Moyers & Company - Families receiving cash assistance, 1996: 68 for every 100 families living in poverty. . .Families receiving cash assistance, 2011: 27 for every 100 families living in poverty

Black News - One in four Americans now live in poverty areas, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The number of people who have been forced to move to poverty areas has greatly increased in the past 14 years.

47 states have poverty rates above pre-recession
The rate of poverty level wages for men has increased. Those between 25 and 44 have seen precipitous increases in the share working at such low wages, with the share more than doubling between 1979 and 2013.

Economic Collapse Blog: Ten years ago, the number of women in the U.S. that had jobs outnumbered the number of women in the U.S. on food stamps by more than a 2 to 1 margin. But now the number of women in the U.S. on food stamps actually exceeds the number of women that have jobs.