Millions live on $2 a day in America. The problem isn't just the safety net, it's the whole economy. [View all]

[HiPointDem]

Millions of Americans are living in the kind of poverty you generally associate with those "you can save a child for the price of a cup of coffee a day" ads. Deep poverty, defined as 50 percent or less of the official poverty level, hit a new high in 2010, with 20.5 million people—6.7 percent of the population—in deep poverty. But sociologist Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer, a social work professor, are looking at a level below deep poverty, occupied by nearly 1.4 million households:

In doing so, they relied on a World Bank marker used to study the poor in developing nations: This designation, which they dubbed "extreme" poverty, makes deep poverty look like a cakewalk. It means scraping by on less than $2 per person per day, or $2,920 per year for a family of four.

In a report published earlier this year by the University of Michigan's National Poverty Center, Edin and Shaefer estimated that nearly 1 in 5 low-income American households has been living in extreme povery; since 1996, the number of households in that category had increased by about 130 percent. Among the truly destitute were 2.8 million children. Even if you counted food stamps as cash, half of those kids were still being raised in homes whose weekly take wasn't enough to cover a trip to Applebees.

This is in line with the Agriculture Department's finding that 20 percent of households receiving food stamps had no cash income in 2010.

How does this happen? It happens when there's no work for millions of people, where there are 3.3 job-seekers for every job. It happens when unemployment insurance benefits expire, as they are about to do for two million people. It happens when single mothers don't have child care and don't want to leave their kids alone, making work outside the home impossible—they don't get Ann Romney's choices. It happens when the jobs people do find are just a few hours a week, at or below minimum wage.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/12/16/1169574/-Millions-live-on-2-a-day-in-America-The-problem-isn-t-just-the-safety-net-it-s-the-whole-economy


I live in a poor neighborhood, & I am seeing this kind of poverty. People who basically have no income except what they can scrape together from social services, scrapping (I know an older man with back problems who bicyles about 20-30 miles every few days looking for recyclables), begging, part-time irregular work and illegal shit.

Some have addictions and other problems, some don't -- like the bicycle man.