Americans have always believed that hard work will bring rewards, but vast numbers now cannot meet their bills even with two or three jobs. More than one in 10 citizens live below the poverty line, and the gap between the haves and have-nots is widening. A shocking 37 million Americans live in poverty. That is 12.7 per cent of the population - the highest percentage in the developed world. They are found from the hills of Kentucky to Detroit's streets, from the Deep South of Louisiana to the heartland of Oklahoma. Each year since 2001 their number has grown.

Oklahoma is in America's heartland. Tulsa looks like picture-book Middle America. Yet there is hunger here. When it comes to the most malnourished poor in America, Oklahoma is ahead of any other state. It should be impossible to go hungry here. But it is not. Just ask those gathered at a food handout last week. They are a cross section of society: black, white, young couples, pensioners and the middle-aged. A few are out of work or retired, everyone else has jobs.

While 45.8 million Americans lack any health insurance, the top 20 per cent of earners take over half the national income. The United States has 269 billionaires, the highest number in the world. At the same time the bottom 20 per cent took home just 3.4 per cent. Whitaker put the figures into simple English. 'The poor have got poorer and the rich have got richer,' he said. There are 37 million Americans living below the poverty line. That figure has increased by five million since President George W. Bush came to power. Almost a quarter of all black Americans live below the poverty line; 22 per cent of Hispanics fall below it. For whites the figure is 8.6 per cent. There are 82,000 homeless people in Los Angeles alone.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1712965,00.html
37 million poor hidden in the land of plenty

Before taxes and transfers, the United States had one of the highest market-based rates of child poverty in 2000: 26.6%. Four other countries "” New Zealand, France, the United Kingdom, and Ireland "” had comparably high market rates of child poverty. The figure also shows that U.S. policies were relatively ineffective in supplementing poverty-level incomes to keep children out of poverty. After taking into account the taxes (including refundable taxes) and transfers, the U.S. still led the 16 developed countries in child poverty.

France had the largest redistributive decline of 20.2 percentage points to a child poverty rate of 7.5%. By contrast, the U.S. rate was reduced by just 4.7 percentage points to 21.9% "” by far the highest child poverty rate of all 16 developed countries, even after government assistance. On average, government taxes and transfers in the other 15 countries reduced child poverty significantly "” by about half "” dropping 10.4 percentage points to 10.7%.

http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/webfeatures_snapshots_20060719
U.S. Government Does Relatively Little to Lessen Child Poverty Rates