Tweet-For three years in a row, poverty has increased in the United States. Today, 35.9 million Americans live in poverty, up 1.3 million people in a single year and accounting for 12.5% of the U.S. population.

-Poverty increased for minors aged 18 or younger to 12.9 million, representing 17.6% of American children. The definition of poverty by the Department of Labor’s definition, for example, applies to a family of four making under $18,000 a year. Clearly poverty can be experienced in reality at considerably higher levels of income by a family of four. Clearly many more families are poor than the -official criteria embrace.

The number of Americans without health insurance continues to increase—now 45 million Americans do not have health insurance. Over the course of a two-year period, 81.8 million were without health insurance for part of the year, or one out of every three Americans under 65 years of age. Two-thirds of those were without health insurance for six months or more. Twenty seven million children were among the uninsured—36.7% of all children in the United States. Bush opposes full Medicare for all Americans.

-According to the National Academy of Sciences, Institute of Medicine, 18,000 Americans die annually because they do not have health insurance. Hundreds of thousands become sick, stay sick or become sicker due to their impoverishment.

-The Bush administration persuaded a federal judge to suspend new black lung regulations that went into effect on January 19, 2001 that would have helped streamline claims by dying miners. He has anesthetized OSHA.

-In UNICEF's 2004 State of the World's Children, the US ranked lower on maternal mortality than 32 -other countries (140 of 172). We lagged behind 33 other nations (160 of 193) on infant mortality rank.
According to the Children's Defense Fund, one of every five infants is born poor in the United States. Today, one of every six is poor now; and one of every three will be poor at some point in their childhood. Bush has presided over an increase in child poverty three years in a row and sounds no alarms.

-One out of four full-time workers receives less than $8.75 per hour before payroll taxes—less than a person, and certainly a family, can live on. Bush has refused to propose an increase in the minimum wage to the inflation adjusted level of the 1968 minimum wage. Indeed he has not urged Congress to raise the Federal minimum from its present level of $5.15 per hour.

-OVer 1,000 U.S. soldiers have died to date in addition to thousands of serious injuries and thousands of illnesses in the fabricated war and occupation of Iraq. Bush refuses to disclose casualties that did not occur in action and he does not report diseases (e.g., from sand flies) at all.

-The United States has killed over 15,000 Iraqi civilians in this illegal war and occupation. Moreover, more than 3,000 civilians in Afghanistan were killed in the U.S. war in Afghanistan. These estimates are not from the Bush administration which refuses to count Iraqi casualties.


Go Bush!