poverty

London's Daily Mail [URL below] is out with a story detailing increasing American poverty, caused by declining wages, aggravated by the Great Recession and budget cuts that already have curtailed social safety net programs. After explaining why 20 percent of all American children are now officially poor, a level not seen since the 1960s, The Mail's reporter went to the chief architect of further budget cutting, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin), chair of the House Budget Committee.

This, in a nutshell, is what the 2012 national elections should be about:

The Associated Press today reports that record numbers of Americans -- now nearly one in two -- are either now officially poor or struggling forward on low-income earnings. That's according to the latest US Census data. Whither the American middle class? Or more accurately, wither the American middle class.

Causes: Unemployment that remains high, a serious lack of government safety nets for middle class wage earners, and years of stagnating wages that have affected millions of middle-class working families.

Sheldon  Danziger, a University of Michigan public policy professor who specializes in  poverty (he used to do the same work at the University of Wisconsin -- Madison), told the AP that prospects for the poor and near-poor are "dismal," adding: "If Congress and the states make further cuts, we can expect the number of  poor and low-income families to rise for the next several years."

Charlie Sykes calls this gas-passing "Patrick McIlheran at his best." and says it's "a trenchant analysis."

Here's Paddy Mac, the Journal Sentinel's farthest-out columnist:

The question isn’t why we tolerate these inequities [between rich and poor] so much as why we tolerate the personal dysfunction that is behind them.

I suggest it’s because what we find more intolerable would be the kind of intrusiveness into the lives of the very poor that could help them become as prosperous as most Americans are. We cannot bring ourselves to forcibly make people not become pregnant while unmarried. We will not force children to pay attention in school or, for that matter, attend school. We won’t mandate a longer time horizon, a change in personal outlook, a resulting ambition to learn a useful career at MATC.