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Now that I've got my notebook out, I can provide some more info:
(all of this can be checked against the census data; if someone has an issue with it, go look it up):
The average amount of people in poverity is 12%, but that is only a snapshot.
If we examine how many people stay poor all year long, ~6% of our population remains constantly poor.
If we examine how many people move in and out of poverty in a given year (as in, a family falls below the threshold for 3 months), the number rises to 20%.
7 million families are poor. 3.5 million of them are married (stable, in-tact, dual parent homes). .5 million are headed by a single male.
Which leaves only 3 million women with children living in poverty (only because evidently we start to see that "welfare queens" aren't that large of the impoverished population relative to everyone else).
This does not count homeless (it can't, work figures are derived from household surveys, not umemployment rosters), illegal workers (both immigrants and black-market, under the table, etc.), or people in the correction system (prison, jail, or other supervisory authority = 2 million people and rising). These figures are also only part of the "civilian workforce" so it doesn't count government workers nor does it count servicepeople.
Hopefully that last line got your attention: there seems to be a large number of servicepeople on this board. Many of their families are going through very hard times right now. Guardspeople know best whether the pay is enough to raise a family. My understanding from the older guardsmen I know is that they supplement their income with it. In any case, their wives are home trying to raise children on their pay right now.
The point is: Tens of millions of Americans (and another ~10 million non-americans) are impoverished in this country. Some are lazy, dumb, and cheats, but obviously we can't write off 30-40 million people to that status.
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"The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account." -- Walter Lippmann
"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." -- Abbie Hoffman
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