Weekend Economists Get a Little Drunk January 27-29, 2012

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46. 46 Million Americans Live in Poverty -- So Why Isn't Anybody Saying the P Word?

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/767199/46_million_americans_live_in_poverty_--_so_why_isn%27t_anybody_saying_the_p_word/

Did you catch the reference in President Obama's State of the Union address to "poverty"?

You can be forgiven if you didn't. Greg Kaufmann of The Nation, who recently launched a weekly column, "This Week in Poverty," on thenation.com, warns in his column today that if you review the video or the transcript of Obama's speech, "don't blink, you'll miss it."

Here’s what he had to say about poverty...:

“A great teacher can offer an escape from poverty to the child who dreams beyond his circumstance.”

Got that? Great teacher, poverty, child who dreams. We good?

People living below the poverty line, 46 million Americans, represent 15 percent of the country, including more than one in five of the nation's youth. And yet, as Kaufmann writes today, "in a 65-minute address describing the state of the union, President Obama decided it merited barely a mention."

Kaufmann, who you can hear above in an interview I conducted earlier this month, is on a crusade to get progressives to start saying "the p word" again. So each week Kaufmann writes a column that highlights the facts, statistics and perspectives that he believes should drive our discussion about poverty, its causes and solutions.