• About one in three severely poor people are under age 17, and nearly two out of three are female. Female-headed families with children account for a large share of the severely poor.
• Nearly two out of three people (10.3 million) in severe poverty are white, but blacks (4.3 million) and Latinos of any race (3.7 million) make up disproportionate shares. Blacks are nearly three times as likely as non-Latino whites to be in deep poverty, while Latinos are roughly twice as likely.

 To read the whole report, click here. 

The Bush White House doesn’t have to look far to find poor people. McClatchy reports:

Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital, has the highest concentration of severely poor people—10.8 percent in 2005, topping even hurricane-ravaged Mississippi and Louisiana, with 9.3 percent and 8.3 percent, respectively. Nearly six of 10 poor District residents are in extreme poverty.

But it’s not just the poor whose numbers are rising. Millions of working families are one paycheck away from poverty, are drowning in debt, often using up their retirement savings to get by, while the richest people in the country are getting richer.

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) reports real incomes for middle-income households were lower in 2005 than in  2001, and real wages, after rising through mid-2003, fell consistently until most recently.

The author of the  EPI report, Jared Bernstein, says:

These unfortunate trends have occurred amid strong productivity growth, which implies that wage and income inequality—and in particular, the gaps between what high-income Americans and other Americans are getting—has grown. Recently released Census data show that the top fifth of households received 50.4 percent of the nation’s income in 2005, equal to the highest share on record.

Meanwhile, Bonddad points out on Daily Kos that even the modest increases in income are not due to higher salaries:

…family incomes haven’t increased because wages have increased. Instead family wages have increased because more people in the family are working. I am not making this statement to disparage anybody who wants to work. However, as the number of people entering the workforce has increased, average hourly earnings (as stated above) have decreased.

In addition, incomes in the 90th percentile have increased nearly twice as fast as incomes in the 50th percentile. In short—the rich are increasing their wages at twice the level as those in the middle.  

Click here to read Bonddad’s diary.

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