Huffington Post

The latest poverty figures paint a grim picture of the Great Recession’s deep and persistent impact on average Americans. Last year, more Americans were poor than ever before, as the poverty rate climbed to a 17-year high.

Yet as bad as that sounds, the number of Americans who are struggling to get by is doubly worse. And, many of them are working but still can’t make a decent living.

On Tuesday, the Census Bureau announced that the nation’s official poverty rate rose to 15.1 percent in 2010, up from 14.3 percent in 2009 to reach the highest mark since 1993. An additional 2.6 million people joined the ranks of the poor, bringing the total to 46.2 million — the highest number since the government started tracking poverty in the 1950s.

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By this measure, in 2010, 33.9 percent of Americans — for a total of 103.6 million — could not make ends meet. This is more than twice the number of officially poor. More than four in 10 children are low income, 32.5 million in all. (The tally of Americans living below 200 percent of poverty is published in Table 6 of the Census Bureau report.)

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