Critical Look At Poverty In U.S.A.

Because of the leftist bias of most newspapers and TV news programs. I tend to get my news from various sites on the Internet. I use domestic as well as foreign sites to gather knowledge of what is happening today.

This has been a reliable source of balanced reporting for me, but today when I logged on, the MSN home page featured an article that caught my eyes.

The article is about 41 million people in the United States not having the basic necessities of life.The article is the product of Professor Donna Haig Friedman and others who are feminist activists that teach at The University of Mass.in Boston, and are leaders of the Center For Social Policy.

In their report they stated that 41 million persons could not afford the basic necessities of shelter and medical care.

Yet in a June 2005 report, she and her collaborators reported that in homeless people they studied for their report. The number one medical problem for 78% of those interviewed was substance abuse!!

To give you an inkling of this professors political sympaties I offer the following quote from her report on the recruitment of PHD candidates at UMass.

"Again this year, we were contacted by the Open Society Institute about a program that is funded by the Soros Foundation Network and USAID that brings Palestinian doctoral students to a limited number of American universities. Although this year’s candidates were better matched to a program in public administration rather than public policy, we are definitely interested in future collaboration".

This gives us a slight inkling what their political positions are. Could it be Socialism?

Before I list some statistics that were released by the Census Bureau. I have to point out that their article says nothing about the impact on poverty by the illegal aliens in this Country. If these women want to write about poverty they could look to the Sudan, Bangladesh or some parts of Communist China!

Homeland Security's Office of Immigration Studies released a report August 31 that estimates the number of illegal aliens residing in the U.S. is between 8 and 12 million. But the group Californians for Population Stabilization, or CAPS, has unveiled a report estimating the illegal population is actually between 20 and 38 million.
Four experts, all of whom contributed to the study prepared by CAPS, discussed their findings at a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington Wednesday. James Walsh, a former associate general counsel of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, said he is "appalled" that the Bush administration, lawyers on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and every Democratic presidential candidate, with the exception of Joe Biden, have no problem with sanctuary cities for illegal aliens.

As our nation prepares to ring in the new year, the U.S. Census Bureau today projected the Jan. 1, 2008, population will be 303,146,284 -- up 2,842,103 or 0.9 percent from New Year’s Day 2007.
In January, the United States is expected to register one birth every eight seconds and one death every 11 seconds.
Meanwhile, net international migration is expected to add one person every 30 seconds. The result is an increase in the total U.S. population of one person every 13 seconds.

There is no disputing that there is poverty in the United States, but overstating the problem in the middle of an election campaign is demagogic and the connection of professor Friedman's UMass. doctorate program indicates where her motivation comes from.

Much of her article concentrates on the plight of the children, but how many children live without at least one parent? If the Census Bureau statistics are true, perhaps the reason children don't have adequate health care is the parents confusion between NEEDs and WANTs!

The census Bureau released the following data in 2003:

Of those considered below the poverty line($20,650 for a family of four), 97% had color TV, 46% owned their own houses,73% owned microwave ovens, 76% lived in air conditioned dwellings, 75% own cars and 30% own two cars.

The average living space for a family of four, below the poverty line, in the United States is larger than the average non-poor person living in Athens, London, Vienna and Paris.

The Census Bureau also reported Tuesday that 36.5 million Americans, or 12.3 percent — were living in poverty last year. That’s down from 12.6 percent in 2005.
The median household income for all families was $48,200, a slight increase from the previous year. But the number of people without health insurance also increased, to 47 million..

If we believe the figures quoted by Profesor Friedman, then only six million people above the poverty line are without health coverage. Not bad for a Country with 20-30 million illegals and a total population over 300 million. But then negative reports always seem to be the Lefts long suit.