9/12/2010 – Catholic Online –
Since President Barack Obama has taken office, the numbers of America’s poor has steadily climbed. Working-age poor people are reaching the levels of the 1960s, before the national war on poverty.
Census figures for 2009 are to be released this week, and demographers expect troubling statistics.
The findings come at a most unfortunate time – seven weeks before Congressional elections, with many Democrats and Obama supporters expected to be voted out. The expected increase, from 13.2 percent to about 15 percent people living below the poverty line, would be another blow to Democrats struggling to persuade voters to keep them in power.
If these estimates hold true, some 45 million people in this country — more than one in seven, were poor last year. It would be the highest single-year increase since the government began calculating poverty figures in 1959. The previous high was in 1980 when the rate jumped 1.3 percentage points to 13 percent during the energy crisis. [Read more…]