Hopeless Change: Poverty Levels on Track to Become Worst in Decades

Is the private sector doing fine, as President Obama insisted a few weeks ago? No, and we’re at the point when it would be fair to declare the LBJ “War on Poverty” an unwinnable quagmire that has been lost.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The ranks of America’s poor are on track to climb to levels unseen in nearly half a century, erasing gains from the war on poverty in the 1960s amid a weak economy and fraying government safety net.

A “fraying government safety net” is giving us more poor people, AP? Please show your work on that.

Census figures for 2011 will be released this fall in the critical weeks ahead of the November elections.

The Associated Press surveyed more than a dozen economists, think tanks and academics, both nonpartisan and those with known liberal or conservative leanings, and found a broad consensus: The official poverty rate will rise from 15.1 percent in 2010, climbing as high as 15.7 percent. Several predicted a more modest gain, but even a 0.1 percentage point increase would put poverty at the highest level since 1965.

Poverty is spreading at record levels across many groups, from underemployed workers and suburban families to the poorest poor. More discouraged workers are giving up on the job market, leaving them vulnerable as unemployment aid begins to run out. Suburbs are seeing increases in poverty, including in such political battlegrounds as Colorado, Florida and Nevada, where voters are coping with a new norm of living hand to mouth.

“Voters are coping with a new norm of living hand to mouth…”

But, four more years!

I’m about to write something very politically incorrect, so brace yourselves. It’s not the “fraying government safety net” that is creating more poor people, it’s the dissolution of the American family that is creating more poor people. Further, if you look at voting trends, one of our two major political parties benefits from that dissolution — the Democrats lead among unmarried voters, while Republicans lead among married voters. That party can be expected to further weaken the family. Doing so is in the Democrats’ political interests. Whether creating more dependent poor people is a driver or a by-product of the intentional dissolution of the American family is up for debate, but it’s a fact that Democrats sell dependency while Republicans sell individual responsibility. One only needs to understand the full meaning of Obama’s and Elizabeth Warren’s “You didn’t build that!” speeches to see the truth.