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Despite persistent poverty across the US,
President Barack Obama, and his republican
challenger, Mitt Romney, rarely mention the
country's most vulnerable. Why are the poor
being ignored?
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"They are certainly not addressing
it in the campaign, Obama may return
to some of these issues after the
elections - assuming he is
re-elected - but even then we expect
to see a grand bargain out of Obama
in the lame duck period. And that is
not necessarily going to help
seniors … so Obama is better than
Mitt, but neither one of them are
addressing it in the campaign. "
- Marcy Wheeler, investigative
blogger |
And while the economy will be the main focus
of the first presidential debate on
Wednesday, so far, the country's poor have
been left out of the conversation.
That is despite the more than 46 million
people who now live below the poverty line.
And tens of millions more are at risk, as
median incomes continue to decline.
The US Census Bureau has set the poverty
threshold for a four-person household at
about $23,000. The median household income
is just over $50,000. Its latest figures
show that in 2011 46.2 million people, or 15
per cent, live in poverty.
Nearly half of them live in 'extreme
poverty' with an income below 50 per cent of
the poverty threshold.
Last year the Census Bureau estimated that
an additional 51 million people are near the
poverty line, with incomes less than 50 per
cent above the threshold.
The UN says the child poverty rate is the
second highest in the developed world,
following Romania with 21.9 per cent of the
nation's children under 18 living in
poverty.
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"The situation is absolutely
devastating where one in every two
people in this country are currently
in poverty and where people are
sleeping on the streets of our rich
country - unable to feed their kids.
And this is all happening because
neither Mitt Romney nor Obama care
about this section of the
population, they only care about
corporate America, they only care
about the one per cent and the rest
of us have just been left on the
wayside … "
- Cheri Honkala, the Green Party |
Minorities are also disproportionately
impacted, with 27.6 per cent of African
Americans and 25.3 per cent of Hispanics
living in poverty.
In contrast, only 9.8 per cent of
non-Hispanic whites live in poverty.
Obama has made very few mentions of poverty
during his address at the DNC, and when he
did, he incorporated conservative rhetoric
often employed against the poor: "We know
that churches and charities can often make
more of a difference than a poverty program
alone. We don’t want handouts for people who
refuse to help themselves, and we certainly
don’t want bailouts for banks that break the
rules."
And it seems there are votes up for grabs if
either of the two main parties chooses to
address the poverty agenda. According to
Gallup: 50 per cent percent of those below
the poverty threshold are Independents, 32
per cent are Democrats and 15 per cent are
Republicans.
With those startling figures in mind we ask:
Are US politicians ignoring the plight of
the country's disadvantaged?
Inside Story US 2012,
with Shihab Rattansi, speaks to guests:
Cheri Honkala, the vice presidential nominee
for the Green Party; Marcy Wheeler, an
investigative blogger, who runs the website
emptywheel.net; and Austin Nichols, a senior
researcher for the Income and Benefits
Policy Center at the Urban Institute.
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"So this is personal to me. We
moved millions of people off
welfare. It was one of the
reasons that in the eight years
I was president, we had a
hundred times as many people
move out of poverty into the
middle class than happened under
the previous 12 years, a hundred
times as many."
Former US President Bill
Clinton, at the Democratic
National Convention, on the
changes made to social
assistance programs under his
administration. |
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