"The Changing Face of Poverty"

From Newsweek:

The census bureau's annual figures on family incomes and poverty were bound to become familiar factoids in the Bush-Kerry combat. The numbers seem to confirm what many people feel: the middle class is squeezed; poverty's worsening. In 2003 the median household income dropped for the fourth consecutive year, to $43,318; the official poverty rate rose for the third year, to 12.5 percent of the population; and the number of people without health insurance increased for the third year to 45 million, or 16 percent of the population. But the debate you're hearing is not the real deal. What ought to be the debate is shunned by both candidates because it touches a politically explosive subject: immigration...

See also Michelle Malkin's "The elephant in the room".

Comments

It is good to have some cracks in the omerta on the effect of changing quality of population by means of immigration. Though one might wonder, if his what-to-do is not more of an expression of resignation, than a call to arms. There is even some charitable cover-up going on there too, in that median household incomes are used, then oddly disaggregated, but without telling us that latino median per capita incomes are only ~12k. This is less than 1/2 the non-hispanic white median per capita income, and it implies overwhelming predominance of net public subsidy use, among the latinos in the US. The government's policies on immigration were not supposed to have this effect, since everyone is equal, except those who, by definition, are workers who can only contribute, and never be a burden. Mentioning that a government program has failed disastrously; that's what it means to fight city hall, or buck the system?