A Census Bureau report last week tells us these are hard times.
OK, on first blush you might be tempted to say, Tell us something we didnt already know.
For more than three years, the economy has been a mess.
And weve barely begun to clear the wreckage of the subprime mortgage meltdown. Millions of bad mortgages remain to be foreclosed, the losses eaten by financial institutions and investors. Until the housing mess is unwound, its unlikely the balance of the economy will be able to make any headway.
Then, again, we dont exactly hold our fate in our own hands. Europe is teetering, with more than just Greece on the brink of bankruptcy.
Hard times, indeed. Positively terrifying, if truth be told.
But the Census Bureau report and other recently released economic numbers do put the matter in high relief.
The report said that a record 46.2 million Americans, or 1 in 6 of us, live in poverty, as officially defined.
At 15.1 percent, that rate is the highest its been since 1983.
About that definition of poverty. According to the federal government, a family of four is poor if its income is below $22,314.
Try living on that.
The report also found that almost 50 million people live without health insurance, or 16.3 percent.
The recession has hit different groups of Americans in different ways.
As a group, the elderly age 65 and over have made out better than just about anyone else, with income actually rising 5.5 percent between 2007 and 2010.
In part, however, this may be a statistical quirk. Wealthy boomers are entering the group, while older Americans who acquired less wealth are dying. Also, the measure of poverty does not account for the cost of health care, on which the elderly make heavy call.
Forty percent of all single-parent families headed by women are in poverty.
This could spell difficulty for decades to come. As Sheldon Danziger, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan, told National Public Radio, We know that children growing up in poverty are more likely to drop out of high school than non-poor children, and theyre less likely to go onto college, which will contribute to lower wages in the next generation.
And young adults, generally, have been hit hard, according to the new data.
Almost half of persons ages 25 to 34 have income below the poverty level of $11,344 if parents incomes are excluded. Thats an astonishing percentage of young people who simply are unable to support themselves.
Its likely to get worse before it gets better.
With unemployment still hovering at around 9 percent, the original federal stimulus program is exhausted and the prospects of new federal money uncertain. Further, state and local governments are shedding jobs fast, throwing more workers into the ranks of the unemployed.
On the other hand, as the Wall Street Journal reported last week, fully 80 percent of the wealth gains in the United States between 1983 and 2009 accrued to the nations wealthiest 5 percent. The top 1 percent alone grabbed 40 percent of the wealth gain, good for an average of a cool $4.5 million per household.
That top 5 percent, by the way, controls 60 percent of the nations wealth, up from 54 percent in 1987.
Somehow, however, we are to believe that the problem with the economy the source of all of this misery for nearly everyone except the wealthy is that the affluent are taxed too much, thereby stifling investment and, therefore, job creation.
If you believe that, we have some collateralized debt obligations backed by subprime mortgages wed like to sell you.
Dont worry theyre AAA-rated, by some of the best minds on Wall Street.