As seniors climb from poverty, young fall in, By Marisol Bello, February 16, 2012, USA Today: “Living in rural North Carolina, Linda Sue Jones doesn’t see her teenage son as the archetype of a national trend. But 15-year-old Josh, as a boy who lives in the South in a household headed by a single woman, is characteristic of the exploding numbers of children in the USA living in poverty – numbers exacerbated by the recession that has pushed many families into poverty for the first time. Twenty miles away, Kenneth Moody, 70, and his wife, Margie, 65, say they, too, are struggling, especially because of high out-of-pocket medical bills. They stay off the poverty rolls because of the $2,000 they receive from Social Security every month. They pay more than $300 a month for prescription drugs but say their medical costs would be even higher if they didn’t have Medicare. ‘It’s life,’ says Margie Moody. ‘That pays our bills, buys our food, pays for the doctor.’ The two families highlight a national trend over the past three decades as child poverty steadily rises and poverty among seniors, aided by social programs, steadily drops…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty