The Change Mariner

Boom Times on the Poverty Roll

New York Times:

An additional 1.7 million Americans slipped into official poverty last year, ground down by the pernicious joblessness that remains the most salient fact of the economic recovery. Job growth -- promised by Republican architects of the new tax cuts favoring the affluent -- remains a national dream. The poverty roll rose to 34.6 million people, more than a third of them children, according to new census data. And the grimness of this trend is hardly reversible in the immediate future as the president and the Republican-led Congress pay for the tax cuts, postwar Iraq and other programs with budget deficits that are projected to sap $5 trillion from the nation's revenue flow over the next decade.

A dark dynamic in the rising poverty is the near tripling of the long-term unemployed in the past three years, to 1.9 million formerly productive workers who have simply given up looking for jobs in the depressed market. Some of the severest poverty and unemployment rates have struck Midwest industrial states, which have suffered many of the 2.7 million payroll jobs lost during President Bush's watch.

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