Looking at a brightening picture for most Americans, in his latest Washington Post column Robert Samuelson points out the storm clouds:
There’s no table with this figure; but it reflects simple arithmetic. Let’s do it. From 1990 to 2016, the number of people living below the government’s poverty line rose from 33.6 million to 40.6 million, a gain of 7 million. Over the same years, the Hispanics in poverty increased from 6 million to 11.1 million, a gain of 5.1 million and 73 percent of the total 7 million boost.
or, in other words, we don’t have a poverty problem in the United States. We have an immigration problem. Let me put it yet another way. If you can think of any way that we can admit unlimited numbers of poor people who don’t speak English and don’t have skills that will yield them any but a meager income without their being poor, I’m all ears.
My own view is that our bad immigration policies exacerbate most of our other problems, including our poverty and racial equity problems. As I’ve noted previously real black median income hasn’t changed in a generation.
How do you average in the income of people who don’t report it?
Odds are the real numbers are even worse than that.