« Because he has none | Main | The Afghanistan Economy Seems to be booming... »
September 03, 2006
But what about their dignity???
Check out this realistic assessment of poverty in the United States. Here are the key graphs:
Housing: In 2001, only about 6 percent of the country's poor households lived in "crowded" dwellings (homes with more than one inhabitant per room), compared with more than 25 percent in 1970, according to the Census Bureau. Today's poor households are more likely to have telephone service and television sets than even non-poor households in 1970; they are much more likely to have central air conditioning than the typical American home of 1980, and almost as likely to have a dishwasher. Moreover, according to a Department of Energy survey in 2001, most poverty households have microwaves, VCRs or DVDs, and cable television -- conveniences unavailable in even the most affluent homes at the time the poverty rate measure was first released.
Autos and motor travel : In 1973, a majority of the households in the bottom fifth of income earners did not own a car. By 2003, nearly three-fourths of all poverty households had a car, truck or van, and a rising fraction owned two or more such vehicles.
Health care: For the affluent and the disadvantaged alike, life expectancy in America has risen significantly since the nation's poverty measures were first developed. The CDC's National Center for Health Statistics has found a broad improvement in national health conditions over the past four decades. Since 1965, for example, the U.S. infant mortality rate (the risk of death in the year after birth) has dropped by more than 70 percent. And regardless of the availability of health insurance, access to medical treatment has risen markedly for poorer Americans: Children in poor families are more likely today to have an annual medical visit or checkup with a doctor than even non-poor children did just 20 years ago.
Posted by Aaron at September 3, 2006 10:33 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.lifelikepundits.com/cgi-bin/mt3/mt-tb.cgi/2760