Number of families in extreme poverty have doubled since 1996

Recovery we can believe in... right?

More than 1.4 million families live on $2 a day per person

The number of families living on $2 or less per person per day for at least a month in the USA has more than doubled in 15 years to 1.46 million.

That's up from 636,000 households in 1996, says a new study released by researchers at the University of Michigan and Harvard University.

Government benefits blunt the impact of such extreme poverty, but not completely, says one of the researchers, Luke Shaefer, a professor of social work at Michigan.

I don't know how they can live on less than $2 a day for at least a month... that is total insanity...

So that means US is becoming like those Egyptians.

Suffocating your citizenry with stagflation is a problem, particularly when that citizenry is young, hungry, and unemployed. By definition this is the Egypt we're seeing today. While this may be a very old country (established in 3100 BC), this 21st century social revolution is being driven by the very young. Almost two-thirds of Egyptians are under the age of 30, and of the 79 million people who live in Egypt, approximately 40% of them live on less than $2 a day.

The Egyptian government has been telling its people that inflation is currently running around +12%. The people of Egypt obviously don't believe that -- and they shouldn't. However, they do believe that the country is running double-digit unemployment. They don't have jobs.

reply to post by emberscott


You can't really compare Egypt to the USA .. poverty is certainly a problem in the USA, but it's nothing like Egypt.

For instance our youth, as poor and bored as they are, can occupy themselves with their Xbox and Netflix. Egyptian youth could pass the day sitting on a wall waiting for work. We also have the most educated unemployed workforce in the World.. and we are also an incredibly apathetic nation.

The USA will come to a head eventually on it's issues, especially when the Boomers start disappearing, and even more so when the generations born from the mid 80's-90's and 00's become the main voter bloc. It will be both an ideological and philosophical shift in American policy.

(Also in the USA for someone making $4 a day, or $1400ish a year they receive approx $40,000 worth of benefits... more then the Egyptian middle class ever made)

Poverty will continue to grow as long as lower and middle class jobs are outsourced to other countries, and the attitude of the country continues to grow in the direction of self serving greed, and the feeling that one is only out for oneself, which is the popular philosophy of the day.

Anybody who thinks people living in true poverty have an "x-box" and "netflix", is living in a fools paradise, sounding rather like Mr. Mitt Romney, who has obviously never seen a truely impoverished familly, except perhaps on television.