The number of poor rose two years in a row

This is the first time the poverty rate has risen in consecutive years since the last time we had a Republican president.

 

Just to put things into perspective...

Near then end of Bill Clinton's first year in office, the nation's poverty rate actually ballooned to 15.1 percent. But by the end of his two terms in office, the poverty rate had been whittled down to the 11.7 percent figure noted above.

 

I don't know how it would be possible to spin this. More people living in poverty is a bad thing, period.

 

Number of Poor, Poverty Rate US Census chart, 1959-2001, here.

 

I'm sure 9/11 will have something to do with it.

 

From a real newspaper:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4586-2003Sep26.html

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In 2002, 12.1 million children were in poverty, or 16.7 percent of all kids, up from 11.7 million, or 16.3 percent, the previous year. The Census Bureau said the increase was not statistically significant

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I love how 400,000 more children living in poverty is "not statistically significant".

So much for no child left behind.

 

great chart, Universal.

 

I remember reading 2/3 weeks ago that at the
same time, the number of millionaires had doubled
in the past couple of years.

 

Well, being an engineer working on a Masters in Human Factors Engineering and supporting scientific laboratory research for a paycheck, I'm going to defend the use of "not statistically significant". It's got a very specific technical meaning that probably (I'm not going to do the math) applies here.

It's not saying that the kids are insignificant, it's saying that the change in percentage of kids living in poverty (+0.4%) is so small that the measurement methodology cannot say that - in reality - the rate has gone up. It could be a measurement error, some kind of funky Heisenberg effect... who knows. They would have to take a larger number of samples to be able to know if that +0.4% is actually representative of the population or not.

 

I hate math. It gets me everytime. Regardless, we're spending $4 billion a month in the desert while we have 12 million kids here who are below the poverty line. Thats $333 a month per impoverished american child. That's a lot of food stamps.

 

Republicans: Call us back when those children get off their a$$es and start producing some crude oil.

 

I'm serious we could buy every impoverished american child a PS2 console and his own copy of Vice-City for the cost of one months occupation.

 

Or for 85 billion you could provide health insurance to every poverty-stricken child in the United States for 5 years.

 

Al Sharpton wants his campaign platform back.

 

Exactly. I brought up PS2s because we're just throwing that money away anyway.

 

Werd.

 

I know I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, but it doesn't make it right, either.

 

I suggest you go dig up a logic textbook and get a feel for the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

 

Which is: A occured before B; therefore A caused B.

Bush's presidency did not occur BEFORE the two consecutive years of poverty growth. Bush's presidency occured DURING the two consecutive years of poverty growth.

I think you better look at that logic textbook a little closer.

 

Or Truman, or Eisenhower, or Kennedy, or Johnson or Nixon.

The fact is, that over the past 30 years both the nominal percentage and the actual number of those in poverty have declined. Despite a number of nasty recessions ( with 1981-83 and 1990-91 recessions being particularly ugly, note the spikes there), the overall population is generally better off. The big and long-term picture shows improvement, and basically, that's how you need to look at those numbers.

At the same time, poverty is obviously systemic in this country, no matter who's running the government. Before you can even being to come up with a solution -- assuming there is one -- you have to ask yourself "WHY is it so systemic?"

What are charactersitics of those in poverty? Poor education? Single parent households? Elderly on fixed incomes? There are demographic and cultural sources for this problem; it's way too facile and superficial to simply blame this political party or that, or the fact that there are lots more millionaires today than 30 years ago.

And we clearly can't grow our way out of this problem -- we had great economic growth in the 1990s, and though both numbers and percentages declined, we still had over 30 million poor.

The optimist in me hates thinking this way, but maybe, just maybe, there's always going to be a core cadre of poor, for reasons that are extremely complex and, at root, completely apolitical in nature. Perhaps, the only hope we have is that long-term econonmic progress -- the progress that brought the percentage rate down from the mid 20s to the teens will, over a long period of time, drop the numbers as the decades pass.

 

Advice to the poverty-stricken: Stop thinking like Democrats and you will improve your station in life. The more you expect the government to hand you, the further behind you will fall.

P.S. The poverty figures are BS and have been BS for many, many years. Just a way for social engineers to push for social program funding.

 

Since poverty is here to stay for the foreseeable future, doesn't it make sense to at least provide decent healthcare?