The Poverty Epidemic Hits the Suburbs
"But little, if anything, is said about the disastrous phenomenon of rising poverty, which, as Hope Yen of The Associated Press reported this week, is “on track to climb to levels unseen in nearly half a century. ... Poverty is spreading at record levels across many groups, from underemployed workers and suburban families to the poorest poor.” Census figures that will be released in the fall, she wrote, are expected to show that poverty has exceeded the level it was at in 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson’s launched his War on Poverty.
These truly are the forgotten Americans. They are invisible to candidates, strategists, pundits and even journalists, except for those dedicated few who stick with the poverty beat.
What’s new is the accelerated move of poverty to the suburbs, a result of the Great Recession. This has complicated even today’s anemic efforts to help the poor as joblessness and foreclosures have hit once-prosperous areas unequipped or unwilling to serve poor residents in the past."
"For the middle class, standards are much more vague. Obama, in pushing for middle-class tax cuts, defines that segment as earning up to $250,000 a year. Some economists define it as between $38,000 and $61,000. Others put it higher or lower. Probably, middle class is largely a state of mind: The affluent like to think of themselves as middle class rather than rich, and those lower down on the economic scale see themselves as middle class rather than poor."http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_poverty_epidemic_hits_the_suburbs_20120726/
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