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Poverty rate finally recedes Number of poor declines after six years on the rise
BY STEPHEN OHLEMACHER The Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Five years into a national economic recovery, the share of Americans living in poverty finally dropped.
The nation’s poverty rate was 12.3 percent in 2006, down from 12.6 percent a year before, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday. Median household income increased slightly, to $48,200.
   The numbers provided some good economic news at a time when fi - nancial markets have been rattled by a slumping housing market. But they were tempered by an increase in the number of Americans without health insurance, from 44.8 million in 2005 to 47 million last year.
   Some advocates said the numbers were evidence of an uneven economy that is leaving many Americans behind.
   “Too many Americans find themselves still stuck in the deep hole dug by economic policies favoring the wealthy,” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles B. Rangel, D-N.Y., said in a statement. “Income remains lower than it was six years ago, poverty is higher and the number of Americans without health insurance continues to grow.”
   Douglas Besharov, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said there is a lot of good news in the numbers.
   “We’re looking at a situation where unemploy- ment was down, and it was down for single mothers, who make up a substantial portion of the people in poverty,” Besharov said. “We need a good economy. That’s not all we need, but we should not complain when it helps lower poverty.”
   The last significant decline in the poverty rate came in 2000, during the Clinton administration, when it went from 11.9 percent to 11.3 percent.
   The poverty rate increased every year for the next four years, peaking at 12.7 percent in 2004. It was 12.6 percent in 2005, but Census officials said that change was statistically insignificant.
   “When we keep taxes low, spending in check and our economy open — conditions that empower businesses to create new jobs — all Americans benefit,” President Bush said in a statement.
   The poverty level is the offi cial measure used to decide eligibility for federal health, housing, nutrition and child care benefits. It differs by family size and makeup. For a family of four with two children, for example, the poverty level is $20,444.
   The poverty rate — the percentage of people living below poverty — helps shape the debate on the health of the nation’s economy.
   Democrats on Capitol Hill said the insurance numbers justify spending more money for a popular government health insurance program for children.
   Both chambers of Congress recently passed bills that would dramatically increase funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, known as SCHIP. The Bush administration, however, opposes both measures saying they would result in people abandoning private coverage for public coverage for children.
   The share of Americans without health insurance hit 15.8 percent last year, the highest percentage since 1998. In 2005, 15.3 percent were without insurance.
   The annual increase was fueled mainly by a decline in the share of workers covered by employerprovided health insurance, said David Johnson, chief of the Census Bureau’s Housing and Household Economic Statistics Division.
   The income group with the most people losing insurance was households making $75,000 or more a year, showing that the issue is not limited to the poor.
   Bush said the growing number of people without health insurance presents a challenge. “Containing costs and making health insurance more affordable is the best way to reverse this long-term trend,” Bush said.
   Several Democrats running for president said the insurance numbers point to weaknesses in the nation’s health care system.
   “These statistics show what most Americans know: Tens of millions of our fellow citizens are completely left out of the economic progress enjoyed by the individuals and corporations on the very top,” said Democrat John Edwards, who has made eradicating poverty a centerpiece of his campaign. “We need truly universal health care and a national effort to eliminate poverty.”
   Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton noted that there were a lot fewer people without health insurance when she first addressed the issue as first lady. In 1993, there were 39.7 million Americans without health insurance, according to the Census Bureau.
   “It is an even deeper outrage today,” she said in a statement.
   Sen. Barack Obama issued a statement that said, “We can keep making excuses for this or ignore it altogether, but as long as these statistics exist, they will always be a betrayal of the ideals we hold as Americans.”

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“Too many Americans find themselves still stuck in the deep hole dug by economic policies favoring the wealthy,” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles B. Rangel, D-N.Y., said in a statement.

And who are YOU considering the wealthy?

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House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles B. Rangel, D-N.Y. continues...“Income remains lower than it was six years ago, poverty is higher and the number of Americans without health insurance continues to grow.”

Hmmm...income's lower, maybe the federal government should take a bigger chunk of our shrinking paychecks.  That's what you wanted to say, isn't it Mr. Rangel?

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“When we keep taxes low, spending in check and our economy open — conditions that empower businesses to create new jobs — all Americans benefit,” President Bush said in a statement.

Too bad, considering I really had hope for Mr. Bush.  Remember, the people that he incudes in the "all Americans" would include 12-20 MILLION ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS FROM MEXICO if he had his choice.  Create new jobs for Americans, send the Mexicans home.

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Both chambers of Congress recently passed bills that would dramatically increase funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, known as SCHIP. The Bush administration, however, opposes both measures saying they would result in people abandoning private coverage for public coverage for children.

If you can get health coverage for your children for free, instead of carrying them on your personal plan, remove any copay/coinsurance/deductible that you would have, wouldn't you take it?  Too bad they're going to take it out of your paycheck first.

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The income group with the most people losing insurance was households making $75,000 or more a year, showing that the issue is not limited to the poor.

I thought that all people who were making under $100,000 a year were now considered "poor."  Better go check with your boss before you publish this...Oops!

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Democrat John Edwards, who has made eradicating poverty a centerpiece of his campaign. “We need truly universal health care and a national effort to eliminate poverty.”

And when you do that, Mr. Edwards, just remember how many people are currently employed at all the private health care companies all across the United States that you're going to be putting out of a job...well, at least they'll have you're health insurance until they find one of those jobs that makes them "rich."

Let's eradicate poverty and put thousands more people out of jobs to have just one national health care company.

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Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton noted that there were a lot fewer people without health insurance when she first addressed the issue as first lady. In 1993, there were 39.7 million Americans without health insurance, according to the Census Bureau.

I wonder if the illegal aliens undocumented workers were part of the 39.7 million, because they are part of the 47 million now.

Well, this is great news. Now we can start cutting out all of those government programs!!!

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The income group with the most people losing insurance was households making $75,000 or more a year, showing that the issue is not limited to the poor.

I thought that all people who were making under $100,000 a year were now considered "poor."  Better go check with your boss before you publish this...Oops!

maybe they over-extended themselves with home/car/shopping/vacations etc.......you know 'keeping up with the Jones'.......

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Poverty: America’s dirty little secret
E.J. Dionne is a nationally syndicated columnist.
E.J. Dionne

   Who could not guffaw over the news that Leona Helmsley left her dog “Trouble” a $12 million trust fund while cutting two of her grandchildren out of her will? The queen of mean, as the tabloids called her, commanded that when “Trouble dies, her remains shall be buried next to my remains in the Helmsley mausoleum.”
   But maybe Helmsley’s obsessions aren’t as different from our own as we’d like to think. Consider the contrast between the extravagant coverage afforded Michael Vick for his guilty plea on a federal dogfighting charge and the scant attention given a new Census Bureau finding that the number of Americans without health insurance had risen by 2.2 million, to a total of 47 million. The number of Americans under 18 without health insurance rose to 8.7 million.
   The Census Bureau report was a one-day story largely buried on the inside pages. So do we care more about dogs than uninsured kids?
   Animal lovers: Hold your brickbats. Our family has a delightful dog rescued from a shelter and I hate cruelty to our canine friends. The issue here is not dogs but people, specifically people in the media.
   Why is it that the poor — and, for that matter, the struggling middle class too — disappear in the media, barricaded behind our fixation on celebrity, our titillation over personal sin and public shame, our fascination with every detail of every divorce and affair of every movie star, rock idol and sports phenom?
   The hiding of the poor is systematic, according to a new study of 38 months of nightly news broadcasts on CBS, NBC and ABC by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a left-of-center organization devoted to media criticism.
   “With rare exceptions, such as the aftermath of Katrina,” the study found, “poverty and the poor seldom even appear on the evening news — and when they do, they are relegated mostly to merely speaking in platitudes about their hardships.”
   In the period between Sept. 11, 2003, and Oct. 30, 2006, there were just 58 stories about poverty on the three network newscasts, according to the study. FAIR couldn’t resist noting that by contrast, in the same period, there were 69 stories about Michael Jackson’s legal woes — and that’s just one celebrity.
   The group estimated that the 191 sources quoted in poverty stories amounted to less than one-half of 1 percent of sources used in news broadcasts in that period.
   To do justice toward the networks, they provided extraordinary coverage of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Anchors such as Brian Williams of NBC and Anderson Cooper of CNN (cable news was not covered in the FAIR study) brought urgency and oldfashioned moral outrage to their reporting on how poor people in New Orleans were treated, and the anchors were backed up by scores of committed reporters and producers dedicated to documenting a natural and human disaster.
   But the Katrina coverage stood out precisely because it was the exception. It took a hurricane to sweep poor people into the news — and they didn’t stay long.
   There is another lesson from Katrina that covering poverty and inequality makes for compelling journalism.
   At its best, broadcast news shines its powerful beacon on problems we have ignored and injustices we can remedy. On May 21, 1968, CBS News broadcast “Hunger in America,” a documentary reported by the legendary Charles Kuralt and David Culhane. One of the viewers that night was a U.S. senator named George McGovern.
   “It was 1968 and I remember saying, ‘Why are they looking at hunger in the United States?’” McGovern recalled in an interview for a recent film on the food stamp program produced by the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. McGovern was riveted by a young boy who told CBS that he was “ashamed” that he did not have enough money to buy food at school.
   “I said to my family that was watching the documentary with me, ‘You know, it’s not that little boy who should be ashamed, it’s George McGovern, a United States senator, a member on the Committee on Agriculture.’”
   From that moment arose one of the most fruitful bipartisan alliances in congressional history: South Dakota Democrat Mc-Govern teamed up with Kansas Republican Sen. Bob Dole to reform food stamps and expand other nutrition programs. To this day, McGovern and Dole are working together in the cause of ending hunger.
   Celebrity stories will always be with us. It’s more challenging and infinitely more important to tell the next story of the boy or girl now living in the shadows who will shake our consciences and change our country.  

  
  
  

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The hiding of the poor is systematic, according to a new study of 38 months of nightly news broadcasts on CBS, NBC and ABC by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a left-of-center organization devoted to media criticism.

The local governments of both New Orleans and Schenectady do a great job at this.....I would think that they would want to seriously push education and push the lower workforce up to other positions......but then again who will be washing their floors, wiping their @#$, cleaning their windows etc.....keep them all 'content' your 'saviour' is just around the corner folks--just wait until after the election and we can take care of you.......

ignorance is the best worker---for cheepskates.....

oh---where is my $5.00 head of lettuce????---my mistake that would be milk.....let's see,, if you are earning a Certified nurse aide wage average of $8.00---you would have to work 1/2 hour just for a gallon of milk.....

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let's see,, if you are earning a Certified nurse aide wage average of $8.00---you would have to work 1/2 hour just for a gallon of milk.....

Then I would strongly recommend that this Certified nurses aid go to school to become a nurse on a government taxpaid program. The opportunity is out there...as Nike commercials would say....'just do it'!!

my point exactly from both ends.......alot of them would be the folks that Ms. Savage would find it too burdonsome to learn English or anyother 'higher-ed' along with getting 'services'.....

we all need a fire under our butts......