{"id":683,"date":"2003-09-26T14:10:37","date_gmt":"2003-09-26T19:10:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/683.html"},"modified":"2003-09-26T14:10:37","modified_gmt":"2003-09-26T19:10:37","slug":"now-we-see-why-they-were-holding-onto-it-until-friday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/now-we-see-why-they-were-holding-onto-it-until-friday\/","title":{"rendered":"Now we see why they were holding onto it until Friday"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier this week, I mentioned<\/a> that the Bush administration would be releasing this year’s national poverty statistics on Friday, as opposed to the usual Tuesday or Thursday, so as to minimize bad publicity. (It’s part of an ongoing trend that prompted The Liquid List to start a contest<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Well, sure enough, the Census Bureau data was released today<\/a> and it’s not good news.<\/p>\n

For the second year in a row, America’s poverty rate increased in 2002 while average income levels fell. The poverty rose to 12.1 percent, from 11.7 percent in 2001. As a result, nearly 34.6 million people live in poverty in the U.S.<\/p>\n

As USA Today explained<\/a>, the official definition of poverty varies by family size and age and can change annually with the cost of living. In 2001, a family of two parents under 65 and two children younger than 18 were considered poor with a household income below $12,207.<\/p>\n

Median household income, meanwhile, declined 1.1 percent in 2002. The income level fell $491 to $42,409.<\/p>\n

Bill Spriggs, director of research and public policy at the National Urban League, told the AP, “This may become one of the worst downturns in income in 30 years,” he said. “We see that people are digging themselves deeper into poverty because the economy is not generating jobs.”<\/p>\n

I would be remiss if I failed to mention that the poverty rate fell throughout the 1990s during Bill Clinton’s presidency, as income levels rose to new heights.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Earlier this week, I mentioned that the Bush administration would be releasing this year’s national poverty statistics on Friday, as opposed to the usual Tuesday or Thursday, so as to minimize bad publicity. (It’s part of an ongoing trend that prompted The Liquid List to start a contest.) Well, sure enough, the Census Bureau data […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=683"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}