Hot news on the poverty front:
Indiana has outshone its neighbors in keeping and attracting jobs, but Census Bureau figures released Tuesday showed that more Hoosiers are slipping into poverty.
Indiana's poverty rate in 2010 climbed to 16.3 percent -- higher than the national average of 15.1 percent and putting the state in a tie for 15th in the nation with California and Oklahoma. Indiana had a poverty rate of 16.1 percent in 2009.
"The bottom line is that things are not as good as we thought they were here in Indiana," said Jessica Fraser, policy analyst at the Indiana Institute for Working Families. "You don't get to 16.3 percent if everything is going right."
The Census Bureau figures bring a response from the Heritage Foundation, which makes the usual conservative argument that "poor" is a relative term -- the poor today have many amenities unheard of in times past; in fact, the poor today are better off than the well-to-do of generations ago. The Journal Gazette manages to convey its disdain for the Heritage position without actually offering any arguments supporting the government definition:
Leave it to the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation to attempt to spin good news out of the report that a record 46.2 million Americans live in poverty.
It's not that bad, the foundation insists, because most poor people live in a decent house and don't go hungry. In fact, 80 percent have air conditioning and 92 percent have microwaves. Four out of five said they never went hungry the previous year (never mind that means 9 million adult Americans did).
While the foundation seeks to spin the definition of poor, here is how the government defines it: An income of less than $21,954 for a family of four. That's $422 a week for two adults and two children
