Who says the US is no longer number one: U.S. Poverty On Track To Rise To Highest Since 1960s

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2. swelling the ranks of the "reserve army of labor"

Reserve army of labour is a concept in Karl Marx's critique of political economy. It refers to the unemployed and under-employed in capitalist society. It is synonymous with "industrial reserve army" or "relative surplus population", except that the unemployed can be defined as those actually looking for work and that the relative surplus population also includes people unable to work. The use of the word "army" refers to the workers being conscripted and regimented in the workplace in a hierarchy, under the command or authority of the owners of capital.

Prior to the capitalist era (i.e. before the 1500s) in human history, structural unemployment on a mass scale rarely existed, other than that caused by natural disasters and wars.[citation needed] Indeed, the word "employment" is linguistically a product of the capitalist era.[citation needed] A permanent level of unemployment presupposes a working population which is to a large extent dependent on a wage or salary for a living, without having other means of livelihood, as well as the right of enterprises to hire and fire employees in accordance with commercial or economic conditions.

Marx argued that there are no substantive laws of population that hold good for all time; instead, each specific mode of production has its own specific demographic laws. If there was "overpopulation" in capitalist society, it was overpopulation relative to the requirements of capital accumulation. Consequently, demography could not simply just count people in various ways, it also had to study the social relations between them as well. If there are enough resources on the planet to provide all people with a decent life, the argument that there are "too many people" is rather dubious.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour