Lost amid all the coverage of James Holmes’s arraignment in Colorado and the presidential candidates resuming their campaigns yesterday was an Associated Press article detailing the troubling rise of poverty in America.
The article cites new 2011 Census data, to be released just weeks before the November elections, which puts the U.S. poverty rate on track to reach a 46-year high. That's 15.7% of Americans who will be considered to be living in poverty.
From the AP story:
The predictions for 2011 are based on separate AP interviews, supplemented with research on suburban poverty from Alan Berube of the Brookings Institution and an analysis of federal spending by the Congressional Research Service and Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute.The analysts’ estimates suggest that some 47 million people in the U.S., or one in six, were poor last year. An increase of one-tenth of a percentage point to 15.2% would tie the 1983 rate, the highest since 1965. The highest level on record was 22.4% in 1959, when the government began calculating poverty figures.
Poverty is closely tied to joblessness. While the unemployment rate improved from 9.6% in 2010 to 8.9% in 2011, the employment–population ratio remained largely unchanged, meaning many discouraged workers simply stopped looking for work. Food stamp rolls, another indicator of poverty, also grew.
For the Latino community, the unemployment rate is even higher. Our recent Monthly Latino Employment Report showed that in the month of June, a staggering 11% of Latinos were unemployed nationally. We are a rapidly growing population that will make up a considerable part of the future workforce, and NCLR is working hard to help find solutions to this problem. Reducing the Latino joblessness rate must be a top priority for our community and indeed for the country if we are to reverse this devastating uptick in poverty in America.
Read the full June Monthly Latino Employment Report, which focuses on the state of Latino workers in Nevada.