BrooksBearLives said:
That doesn't refute what I posted at all.
They can BOTH be true.
He posted a recently (March 19) federal agency record as reference.
You posted an older (August 18) journalistic judgment (Forbes: Peter Georgescu) of weekly magazine (The Nation) that covers progressive political and cultural news, and opinions.
His March '19 - 36.3 million is a correctly referenced number.
Your source data is incorrect.
"The Nation recently published a stunning overview of the working poor and underpaid. One of the most powerful data points in the piece described how empty the decline in unemployment actually is: having a job doesn't exempt anyone from poverty anymore. About
12% of Americans (43 million) are considered poor, and yet they are employed. They earn an individual income below $12,140 per year, and slightly more than that for a family of two. If you include housing and medical expenses in the calculation, it raises the percentage of Americans living in poverty to 14%. That's 45 million people."
Your Forbes link references:
https://www.thenation.com/article/united-states-national-security-problem-not-think/ Which references the original article:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176447/tomgram%3A_rajan_menon%2C_the_wages_of_poverty_in_america/From the original article:
"For millions of Americans, however, the greatest threat to their day-to-day security isn't terrorism or North Korea, Iran, Russia, or China. It's internaland economic. That's particularly true for the
12.7 percent of Americans (43.1 million of them) classified as poor by the government's criteria: an income below $12,140 for a one-person household, $16,460 for a family of two, and so on until you get to the princely sum of $42,380 for a family of eight.
Savings aren't much help either: A third of Americans have no savings at all and another third have less than $1,000 in the bank. Little wonder that families struggling to cover the cost of food alone increased from 11 percent (36 million) in 2007 to 14 percent (48 million) in 2014.
THE WORKING POOR
Unemployment can certainly contribute to being poor, but millions of Americans endure poverty when they have full-time jobs or even hold down more than one job.
The latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that there are 8.6 million "working poor," defined by the government as people who live below the poverty line despite being employed at least 27 weeks a year. Their economic insecurity doesn't register in our society, partly because working and being poor don't seem to go together in the minds of many Americansand unemployment has fallen reasonably steadily. After approaching 10 percent in 2009, it's now at only 4 percent."
Please note how your "source" manipulated the presented information and you posted it without verifying.
Also please note that the bls data referenced in original article is from 2015 and contains this opening paragraph.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/working-poor/2015/home.htm "In 2015, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 43.1 million people, or 13.5 percent of the nation's population, lived below the official poverty level.1 (See the technical notes section for examples of poverty levels.)
Although the poor were primarily children and adults who had not participated in the labor force during the year, 8.6 million individuals were among the "working poor" in 2015, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics; the 8.6 million figure was down from 9.5 million in 2014."