POVERTY: US: Dramatic rise in hunger and poverty

May 14, 2011

According to Forbes magazine, there were 1,011 billionaires in the world in 2010 – out of them 40% live in the US. There are 10.5 millionaire households in the US with 43% of world’s wealth – CNNMoney reported on May 9, 2011
However, the 2011 report released by the World Hunger organization paints a very ugly economic picture within the world’s richest nation ($17 trillion GDP). Following are some of the highlights of the report:
1. In 2009, 43.6 million people were poor, up from 39.8 million in 2008 and 37.3 million in 2007 . The nation’s official poverty rate in 2009 was 14.3 percent, up from 13.2 percent in 2008 — the second statistically significant annual increase in the poverty rate since 2004.
2. The poverty rate in 2009 was the highest since 1994, but was 8.1 percentage points lower than the poverty rate in 1959, the first year for which poverty estimates are available. The number of people in poverty in 2009 is the largest number in the 51 years for which poverty estimates are available.
3. Between 2008 and 2009, the poverty rate increased for children under the age of 18 from 19.0 percent to 20.7 percent. Thus one in five children in the United States live in poverty. Almost half of these children (9.3 percent) live in extreme poverty.
4. In 2009, the family poverty rate and the number of families in poverty were 11.1 percent and 8.8 million, respectively, up from 10.3 percent and 8.1 million in 2008.
5. 19 million Americans( 6.3 percent) live in extreme poverty. This means their family’s cash income is less than half of the poverty line, or less than about $11,000 a year for a family of four.
6. The percentage of people without health insurance increased to 16.7 percent in 2009 from 15.4 percent in 2008. The number of uninsured people increased to 50.7 million in 2009 from 46.3 million in 2008.
7. There are 42.4 million Americans need food stamps to survive. Another one million children receive free or subsized school lunches daily, while close to 400,000 pregnant women and nursing mothers depend on government-supplied milk.
http://rehmat1.wordpress.com/2011/05/14/dramatic-rise-in-hunger-and-poverty-in-us/