The 48 Percenters

Those lucky duckies who are just bleeding the beleaguered job-creating one percent dry are now at 48 percent of the population because they fall near, at, or below the poverty line.

The stats are from the Census Bureau:

About 97.3 million Americans fall into a low-income category, commonly defined as those earning between 100 and 199 percent of the poverty level, based on a new supplemental measure by the Census Bureau that is designed to provide a fuller picture of poverty. Together with the 49.1 million who fall below the poverty line and are counted as poor, they number 146.4 million, or 48 percent of the U.S. population. That's up by 4 million from 2009, the earliest numbers for the newly developed poverty measure.

The new measure of poverty takes into account medical, commuting and other living costs. Doing that helped push the number of people below 200 percent of the poverty level up from 104 million, or 1 in 3 Americans, that was officially reported in September.

Broken down by age, children were most likely to be poor or low-income — about 57 percent — followed by seniors over 65. By race and ethnicity, Hispanics topped the list at 73 percent, followed by blacks, Asians and non-Hispanic whites.

The neolibs will argue that the U.S. isn't a third world country because few people are begging in the streets like they do in Calcutta or Kolkata or whatever in the hell it is called now (I am SO sick of all of this changing names of cities and countries--I can't even keep up with it anymore).

Gotta lower the living standards even more.