Political Reaction to Poverty Rate

Poverty numbers get muted reaction on Hill, By Michael A. Fletcher, September 18, 2010, Washington Post: “Deborah Weinstein, a longtime advocate for the poor, calls the news that one in seven Americans is living in poverty ‘a national emergency.’ But for much of Washington’s political class, the shocking new poverty numbers provoked not alarm about the poor but further debate over tax cuts for the middle class. ‘We know that a strong middle class leads a strong economy,’ President Obama told reporters in the Rose Garden on Friday, as he used the new census report, which also showed that middle-class income has dipped slightly over the past decade, to continue making his case for limiting the cuts to family incomes under $250,000. Meanwhile, Republican leaders in the House and Senate had no reaction to the poverty report. But earlier in the week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) took the Senate floor to argue for extending the tax breaks to everyone, saying, ‘We can’t let the people who have been hit hardest by this recession and who we need to create jobs to get us out of it’ be subject to a tax increase. McConnell’s spokesman later clarified the statement, saying that McConnell indeed believes the economic downturn has hit the poor harder than it has high-income business owners, who also have suffered. The reluctance of political leaders on both sides of the aisle to directly confront the fact that growing numbers of Americans are slipping into poverty reflects a stubborn reality about the poor: They are not much of a political constituency…”