The U.S. Is Losing a Generation to Poverty
The statistics provided in this report aren't news to me but it's the responses that are so frustrating. Although some of the respondents obviously understand the underpinnings of generational poverty, an equal number seem to have lifted their opinions of the country's poor straight from Rush radio. If only we, as a society, held the corrupt 1% to account as some do the poor! 
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/09/18/the-us-is-losing-a-generation-to-poverty.html
The Daily Beast
Sept 19, 2014
The U.S. Is Losing a Generation to Poverty
OK, the official poverty rate declined this week. But it’s worth remembering that millions who aren’t officially in poverty are still poor.
When we devised the formula we use to determine poverty in the United States, it was 1964. President Lyndon Johnson had just taken a tour of communities in Appalachia without electricity, running water, or sewage systems. Indeed, even some urban neighborhoods lacked that basic infrastructure. There was no Medicare system—so the elderly were very poor and largely uninsured—and consumer goods for the middle class, like televisions and vehicles, were pretty new. Food took up much more of a family’s budget, and housing took up much less.
The world was incredibly different. But the way we measure poverty remains the same. We also still imagine poverty looks the way it did in 1964. In reality, economic hardship is much more commonplace, and its appearance is more subtle. Its effects, however, are no less devastating.
This week, when the United States Census Bureau released its poverty data for the year 2013, it showed the first significant decline in poverty since the Great Recession hit: down from 15 percent to 14.5. Greeted more cheerily by economic observers was the news that child poverty had made its biggest drop in years: down almost 2 whole percentage points. It was better news than observers expected.... MORE at link provided above.
= new reply since forum marked as read
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A sprawling new plant here in a former soybean field makes the mechanical guts of America’s atomic warheads. Bigger than the Pentagon, full of futuristic gear and thousands of workers, the plant, dedicated last month, modernizes the aging weapons that the United States can fire from missiles, bombers and submarines.
It is part of a nationwide wave of atomic revitalization that includes plans for a new generation of weapon carriers. A recent federal study put the collective price tag, over the next three decades, at up to a trillion dollars.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/22/us/us-ramping-up-major-renewal-in-nuclear-arms.html?_r=0
DURec
I was just thinking that rural Northern California is also needy.
And rural Central California.
And rural Southern California.
And rural Oregon.
And... 
In Dickens day, it was all about the "undeserving poor" and how their poverty was their own fault for being immoral, not wanting to work, drinking, etc (and conservatives still think that way). I grew up poor and I'm now unable to work due to mental illness and physical disability. The shit I read about "benefit scroungers" (our version of "welfare queen" is all about how it's possible to make more on benefits than in work (a lie) and how the poor "don't have the habit of work" (our demonic DWP secretary). And the middle-class have been trained, in your country and mine, to always kick downwards. To always say benefits are too high, not wages are far too low.
