80% of US Adults Near Poverty vs. Increased Corporate Profits

Serge Melki/Wikimedia Commons

While the stock market is reaching new highs and corporate profits are doing better and better, as stated before these numbers don't tell the full story. According  to a recent AP survey "80% of U.S. Adults Are Near Poverty, Rely on Welfare, or Are Unmployed," and "Pessimism among whites about their families' economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy "poor."
 
Among the other findings:


- More than 19 million whites fall below the poverty line of $23,021 for a family of four, accounting for more than 41 percent of the nation's destitute, nearly double the number of poor blacks.

- For the first time since 1975, the number of white single-mother households who were living in poverty with children surpassed or equaled black ones in the past decade, spurred by job losses and faster rates of out-of-wedlock births among whites.
 -  By 2030, based on the current trend of widening income inequality, close to 85 percent of all working-age adults in the U.S. will experience bouts of economic insecurity.

The seriousness of these findings is only enhanced by the knowledge that just 400 persons in the U.S. have as much in assets and income as the bottom 50% of the Americans (and for that matter, the richest 300 persons globally have more than the poorest 3 billion.)


See also comments by the blog.....:


Zero Hedge showing the divergence of the rise in corporate profits vs. the percentage of U.S. population with a job.   In below documentary America's Broken Dream by French director Philippe Levasseur real life examples are shown of how some people struggle in this economy.  It doesn't paint a hopeful picture. So which story is correct, the corporate numbers and capital markets, or the reality of poverty on the ground?

                                                            America's Broken Dream