How Red States Treat Their Children - Children in Extreme Poverty
A just-released report from the Southern Education Foundation — "The Worst of Times: Children in Extreme Poverty in the South and Nation" — finds that more than 5.7 million children lived in extreme poverty in the United States in 2008 — surviving on less than seven or eight dollars per day. Almost one in every twelve children was in a household with an income below 50 percent of federal poverty line.1 These children belonged to households in every state of the Union, but they were largely concentrated in the fifteen states of the U.S. South. More than 2.4 million extremely poor children — 42 percent of the nation's total — lived in the South.While most of the soul crushing poverty of the 1950s has been alleviated, it seems to be making a comeback. Even the basic safety net for health care for the poor, Medicaid, is being slashed in many states, most of that in the south and west, but Republican governors in Wisconsin and New Jersey have plans to catch up with their southern compatriots.
Ten of the eleven states in the nation where at least one in every ten children are in extreme poverty were in the South.2 Mississippi had the largest proportion — 14 percent. Louisiana, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Alabama followed at 11 to 12 percent. Arkansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Texas had one child in every ten in extreme poverty. New Mexico with 11 percent was the only non-Southern state with the nation's highest rates of extreme child poverty.
The recent recession has expanded the number of extremely poor children by an estimated 26 percent — adding as many as 1 ½ million children in extreme poverty since 2008. During the last two years, the western states have had the largest rise of extremely poor children, although every section of the nation has had a substantial increase.
The rise of hardship and extreme poverty for children, especially in the southern and western states, will probably continue beyond the first half of 2010. From June 2009 through March 2010, the number of jobless workers continued to grow in the South and the West. The number of mortgage foreclosures between November 2009 and January 2010 continued to rise in western and southern states. Nine states in the South and four in the West had bank card delinquency rates above the national average during the last three months of 2009. Seven southern states and five western states had delinquency rates for automobile loans of one percent of more — substantially above the national average of .81 percent — in the last quarter of 2009.
During the same period, 10 percent or more of the student loans for higher education were at least sixty days delinquent in most counties in the United States.
How's that civility thing working out? Breitbart: Code Pink Protestors Used To Be 'Kind Of Slutty,' Now They're 'Long In The Tooth'
In his rambling CPAC speech today, Andrew Breitbart described how he has enjoyed going to progressive rallies and peppering the protesters with questions. But, he said, the women of the anti-war group Code Pink are "tedious at this point" because they used to be "kinda slutty lefties," but "they're getting long in the tooth."This is the same Brietbart who was a mentor of convicted criminal James O'Keefe and who posted the doctored video of ACORN and recently, the highly edited Planned Parenthood video. Andrew cannot seem to win based on honest tactics or an honest debate. Maybe what he means by "fun" is acting with all the integrity of a cockroach.
"I don't know why I decided to make my career trying to destroy the institutional left. I thought that would be a fun thing to do," he said at the opening of his remarks. He described how he's found that the people in protests "are not individuals. They've been community organized."
"They're not Americans," Breitbart said later. "They're animals."
