call me suspicious....

New report - one in two Americans are poor......

http://money.msn.com/debt-management/vi ... n-us_money

I suspect "low income" means "income below the median" ---- so yeah - half of Americans have income below the median.

Yes- and 50% of Americans have an IQ lower than average also.

Actually- that's the definition of "median" and "average".

This is just more mainstream media class warfare propaganda.

:VeryScared: Clearly America can't afford even one more year of Obama.

The one story said people have fallen below the poverty line, but at least the people I know with jobs don't appear to be below the line.

I dug around, and the figures come from here:

http://www.census.gov/hhes/povmeas/meth ... PM2010.pdf

I suspect an ambitious reported added the official poverty measure to the supplemental poverty measure.

Nowhwere in the report do we get anywhere near half of the US population.

About 97.3 million Americans fall into a low-income category, commonly defined as those earning between 100 and 199 percent of the poverty level, based on a new supplemental measure by the Census Bureau that is designed to provide a fuller picture of poverty. Together with the 49.1 million who fall below the poverty line and are counted as poor, they number 146.4 million, or 48 percent of the U.S. population. That’s up by 4 million from 2009, the earliest numbers for the newly developed poverty measure.

The hysteria comes from bad math, folks.

The supplemental figure should not be added to the official figure (the supplemental figure already includes most of the individuals that would be in the official figure).

You can tell, since the official document calculates a "difference" between the two columns (the number of individuals who would be caught by the supplemental measure).

Meanwhile

[youtube:358k0jlp][/youtube:358k0jlp]

There's a really important footnote in the official document:

http://www.census.gov/hhes/povmeas/meth ... lation.pdf

These estimates were done as a special tabulation and have undergone more limited review than
official publications

One paper got it right --- NYT:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011 ... tml?ref=us