Of more interest to me is the frozen capital at the top and we refuse to tax them to free some of it for work in the economy.
REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ed Weick Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2010 10:07 AM To: [email protected] Cc: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Not a very positive picture >From yesterday's Washington Post. Ed _____ As 44 million Americans live in poverty, a crisis grows By <http://projects.washingtonpost.com/staff/articles/katrina+vanden+heuvel/> Katrina vanden Heuvel Tuesday, September 28, 2010 It's clear that the Great Recession battered those on the bottom most heavily, adding 6 million people to the ranks of the officially poor, defined as just $22,000 in annual income for a family of four. Forty-four million Americans -- one in seven citizens -- are now <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/16/AR201009160 2698.html> living below the poverty line, more than at any time since the Census Bureau began tracking poverty 51 years ago. Shamefully, that figure includes one in five children, <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/angela-glover-blackwell/poverty-in-black-whit e-an_b_721124.html> more than one in four African Americans or Latinos, and over 51 percent of female-headed families with children under 6. These numbers are bad enough. But dig deeper -- as Georgetown University law professor Peter Edelman has been doing for nearly 50 years in his battle against poverty -- and the story told by these figures is even more staggering. Edelman points out that 19 million people are now living in "extreme poverty," which is under 50 percent of the poverty line, or $11,000 for a family of four. "That means over 43 percent of the poor are extremely poor," said Edelman, who served as an aide to Sen. Robert Kennedy (D-N.Y.) and in the Clinton administration before resigning in protest over welfare reform that shredded the safety net. "That's over 6 percent of the population, and that figure has just been climbing up and up." Edelman says that the number of people living at less than two times the poverty line ($44,000 for a family of four) is equally significant. "Data shows that's really the line between whether or not you can pay your bills," said Edelman. "That has reached 100,411,000 people. That's 33 percent of the country. That's the totality of the problem -- whether you call it poverty or not." For too long we have accepted the narrative -- promoted by well-funded conservative think tanks -- that claims people who are struggling are to blame for their troubles, and at the same time we don't have effective anti-poverty policies. So tackling the problem is seen as wasteful. "So many people think it's their own fault," said Edelman. "They don't see the structural problem in our economy." But with so many in poverty, that narrative has become harder to sustain during the Great Recession, and so renewed work is being done to take on poverty and its structural underpinnings. [If you want to read more, go to: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/28/AR2010092802 356.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions
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