Brownsville ranks poorest in the nation - AGAIN!

This is the city where I lived when I attended High School. Friends of mine and I recently visited there on behalf of Bread for the World Institute to learn about persistent poverty.

I am ashamed that anyone would tout a population wherein 40% are below the poverty threshold as one that is making gains. Traci Wickett who is mentioned below is right. We have to get someone's attention. I hope that you will read this and help by paying attention to this and many other places in the U.S. and around the world where persistent hunger and poverty exist. MG

Brownsville ranks poorest in the nation

By Chris Mahon/The Brownsville Herald

August 28, 2007 - 11:46PM

The Census Bureau ranks Brownsville as the most impoverished city in the nation, according to the bureau's 2006 American Community Survey released on Tuesday. More than 40 percent of the city's 171,000 residents live below the poverty line, the bureau's figures show.

The bureau's poverty threshold for an individual is a $10,294 annual income. For a family of four it is $20,614.

Despite the last-place standing, there are slight gains being made in this area. In 2005, the poverty level was 42.6 percent, compared to 40.6 percent in 2006.

Median household income in Brownsville, the fourth lowest in the nation, is also inching north — $26,017 last year, compared to $24,207 in 2005.

"We've got to get people's attention on this," said Traci Wickett, president of United Way of Southern Cameron County.

United Way aims to reduce poverty in two ways, she said. Its first strategy is to improve educational attainment through initiatives such as Success by Six, which focuses on high-quality early childhood education.

The other strategy is to getting people stable financially by accessing the Earned Income Tax Credit, and other state and employer benefits available to them.

"When we talk about poverty in our community, we're not talking about people who are unemployed. We have a lot of hard working people in our community who live below the poverty line."

In the Brownsville-Harlingen metropolitan statistical area the unemployment rate was 6.5 percent in June, compared to 7.4 percent the year prior. That's about 9,400 people.

Area-wide, the Census Bureau rated Hidalgo County as the poorest county in the nation, with Cameron County coming second to last.

Also on Tuesday, the bureau released another population report, titled, "Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2006.

According to that survey, Texas had the highest population of uninsured in the country, with 24.1 percent. That survey does not give more local data.



On the Web: www.census.gov

Disclaimer: Poverty is not really all that bad, is it?

What follows is taken directly from the Heritage Foundation website. You can find it yourself by calling up a list of all issues coverend by the Heritage Foundation and under Welfare Reform it will list Poverty and Inequality. This is just the disclaimer. It was clearly not enough for the Heritage Folks to claim that poverty is "more limited in scope and severity than one might think." No, they then list a series of articles and lectures published over the past few years, each with some other bombastic claim:

Performance Based Pay is Driving Increase in Inequality and that claims of growing hunger in the U.S. are wildly exaggerated... Published in 2004, the paper intended to discredit the reality of hunger experienced daily by millions of Americans has been proven wrong, year after year as hunger and poverty continued to increase. Now who's exaggerating?

Poverty & Inequality: "ISSUES > Welfare > Poverty & Inequality

Poverty and Inequality

For most Americans, the word poverty suggests destitution: an inability to provide a family with nutritious food , clothing, and reasonable shelter. Advocates of the welfare state often urge large expansions of welfare spending to combat allegedly widespread poverty in America, yet only a small portion of the 37 million persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau fit that description. While real material hardship certainly does occur, it is much more limited in scope and severity than one might imagine." ~ The Heritage Foundation

How the Democrats Got Religion

Thursday, Jul. 12, 2007 By NANCY GIBBS AND MICHAEL DUFFY

A President has to be a preacher of sorts, instructing, consoling, summoning citizens to sacrifice for some common good. But candidates are competitors, which means they seldom manage to talk about faith in a way that doesn't disturb people, doesn't divide them, doesn't nail campaign posters on the gates of heaven. Republicans have been charged with exploiting religious voters, Democrats with ignoring them: Hillary Clinton's voice gets tight as she recalls the mocking response she received when she first spoke in spiritual terms about the longing that people felt to invest in causes larger than self-interest. "I talked about my faith years ago and was pilloried for it," she says, and it is hard to tell if she is more impatient with the conservatives who presumed they held the patent on piety or with the liberals whose worship of diversity all but excluded the devout. Read this recent article in Time Magazine (full article)