US Poverty Rate at 15-year high

Rotting from the inside out, is how I'd best describe the current circumstances.

The US census bureau came out this week with some further data that shows that the decade of the zeroes was a bust for most people.  The NY Times summarizes:

With the country in its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, four million additional Americans found themselves in poverty in 2009, with the total reaching 44 million, or one in seven residents. Millions more were surviving only because of expanded unemployment insurance and other assistance.

Professor Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard, states in this second article, “This is truly a lost decade... We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we’re looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990s."

Everyone was quite happy when they were making a bit more and the music played on; even if the top 1% were making multiples at the time.  Now the day of reckoning has arrived and people are awakening to the real morning in America.  Less opportunities, less income, more social inequality, a middle class in decline, and a federal government that is completely owned and bought for and by corporate interests.  This is the rancid fruit of thirty years of Reaganomics.

The specific details provided by the article, show that the nation is in decline.

• Last year, about 48 million people ages 18 to 64 did not work even one week out of the year, up from 45 million in 2009, said Trudi Renwick, a Census official. 
• According to the Census figures, the median annual income for a male full-time, year-round worker in 2010 — $47,715 — was virtually unchanged, in 2010 dollars, from its level in 1973, when it was $49,065, said Sheldon Danziger, professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. 
• The period from 2001 to 2007 was the first recovery on record where the level of poverty was deeper, and median income of working-age people was lower, at the end than at the beginning.
• 22 percent of children are in poverty, the highest percentage since 1993. 
• For a single adult in 2009, the poverty line was $10,830 in pretax cash income; for a family of four, $22,050. 

Given that the Great recession will continue for years, perhaps even throughout this current decade, poverty rates will increase, social unrest will occur, and political mayhem may well ensue in the years to come, unless serious and coordinated changes are made.