http://www.docudharma.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=6561#125607John Edwards leads Half in Ten Effort on Poverty
by: TomP
Fri May 09, 2008 at 11:05:29 PDT
John Edwards has joined with several organizations to try to cut poverty in America in half in the next 10 years.
Watch the video with John Edwards and join the movement here:
http://www.halfinten.org/ One in eight Americans now lives in poverty. A family of four is considered poor if the family's income is below $19,971-a bar far below what most people believe a family needs to get by. Still, using this measure, 12.6 percent of all Americans were poor in 2005, and more than 90 million people (31 percent of all Americans) had incomes below 200 percent of federal poverty thresholds.
Millions of Americans will spend at least one year in poverty at some point in their lives. One third of all Americans will experience poverty within a 13-year period. In that period, one in 10 Americans are poor for most of the time, and one in 20 are poor for 10 or more years.
Poverty in the United States is far higher than in many other developed nations. At the turn of the 21st century, the United States ranked 24th among 25 countries when measuring the share of the population below 50 percent of median income.
Inequality has reached record highs. The richest 1 percent of Americans in 2005 held the largest share of the nation's income (19 percent) since 1929. At the same time, the poorest 20 percent of Americans held only 3.4 percent of the nation's income.
It does not have to be this way. Our nation need not tolerate persistent poverty alongside great wealth.
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