I read shit like this and it boils my blood, this shouldn't be. :angry:

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/breakingnews/...rticle_id=85300


36.5 million live in poverty in United States -- report

Agence France-Presse

Posted date: August 29, 2007

WASHINGTON -- Some 36.5 million people lived in poverty last year in the United States, with children and blacks the worst affected, a report by the US Census Bureau showed Tuesday.

The number of poor people out of the total US population of 302 million was equivalent to the entire state of California -- paradoxically one of the richest states -- one-and-a-half times the population of Malaysia or nearly everyone in the central European nation of Poland living in poverty.

But the Census Bureau stressed the positive in its report, which also looked at median income and numbers of people with health insurance, pointing out that earnings rose and the poverty rate fell from 2005 to 2006.

According to the report, around 12.8 million children under the age of 18, or around one-third of the 36.5 million poor, existed in 2006 with annual funds below the income threshold used by the Census Bureau to determine who lives in poverty.

For a single person under the age of 65, the income threshold was 10,488 dollars a year; for a single parent with one child, it was 13,896 dollars.

The number of people over the age of 65 who lived in poverty fell last year to 3.4 million from 3.6 million in 2005, while the 18-64 age group showed no change at 20.2 million in poverty.

In percentage terms, three times more black people -- 24.3 percent -- lived in poverty than the 8.2 percent of white people who did.

The south was the worst hit geographic area, with a poverty rate of 13.8 percent, and more than 29 million of the United States' poor live in large cities or their suburbs.

The median household income in the United States increased by 0.7 percent from 47,845 dollars (35,097 euros) to 48,201 dollars (35,359 euros) last year from 2005, the report said.

But the increase for black households was only 0.3 percent, while white households enjoyed an increase of 1.1 percent and Asians of 1.8 percent.

Women tend to earn 77 percent of the salary of men in an equivalent job, the report said.

It also showed that 47 million people had no health insurance in the United States last year, an increase from the 44.8 million who had no coverage in 2005.

http://www.overthelimit.info/health/2007/0...ose-47-million/

Thanks to Bush, the number of Americans without health insurance up to 47 million

August 29th, 2007

The nation’s poverty rate declined last year for the first time this decade, but the number of Americans without health insurance rose to a record 47 million, according to annual census figures released yesterday. Texas led all states in the percentage of residents without health insurance, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report.

The Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2006 report draws on information collected in two surveys: the 2007 Current Population Survey (CPS) Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC).

Although median household income, adjusted for inflation, rose for the second straight year, it has not reached the pre-recession high of 1999.

The increase from 2005 to 2006 in median household income, to $48,201, appeared to be mainly the result of a jump in the number of people per household who held a full-time job rather than a rise in wages. Earnings of both men and women declined by slightly more than 1 percent.
Based on the three-year average from 2004 to 2006,

Texas had an uninsured population rate of 24 percent. New Mexico and Louisiana had the next-highest rates, each topping 20 percent.

Following Texas were New Mexico and Florida, which both had uninsured rates topping 20 percent. Minnesota and Hawaii came in at the bottom, both below 10 percent.

Bush chose to highlight the fact the report shows American household income is rising and poverty is going down albeit only slightly and only for the first time this decade. He conceded however that there remains a challenge to reduce the number of Americans without health insurance, choosing to stress that the best route to this is to make it more affordable rather than bring more into the government scheme.

The income and poverty estimates do not include the value of non cash benefits such as food stamps, Medicare and Medicaid, public housing and fringe benefits from employers. Alternative measures of income and poverty that show the effect of taxes and certain non cash benefits will be published later said the report.

“To be in worse shape in the fifth year of a recovery than during the previous recession is both unprecedented and disappointing,” said Robert Greenstein, executive director of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

“Our economy was in very bad shape for a significant period of time, and when that happens, you are going to see incomes fall,” Fratto said.

The numbers living in poverty from the US Census Bureau is horrible for a country as wealthy as this. For a country that can afford to spend billions upon billions of our dollars a month a war that seems to be endless and this is not to mention that is was uncalled for, on a small country that was no threat and sold to the public by lies.

But these numbers mentioned in the US Census Bureau, at least I doubt, include the many homeless since they never get a census form. And their numbers are completely unknow, but they are very high.

Come to think of it...I haven't received a form in the last twenty five years.

Now that is just ridiculous. I've lived in India, where poverty is huge, but they're a developing country... Now, I wonder where all the US money is going?

You know what they can do with those census forms???? :angry: