More on Priorities

Trey Smith

On Monday night, I shared a snippet in a post entitled, Priorities, which illustrated that the White House is expressing far more concern about impending cuts to the military budget than for almost anything else, certainly NOT the poor. I'm not the only person who has noticed this trend. As Mariana Graces and Steve Rendall of FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) report,

"All this talk today about poverty got us wondering just how many people in America live below the poverty line,” anchor Scott Pelley announced on the CBS Evening News (2/1/12). By “all this talk,” Pelley was referring to less than 200 words, in a report CBS had just aired on GOP candidate Mitt Romney’s missteps, that discussed Romney’s remark that he wasn’t “concerned about the very poor.”

Though the brief story was actually about the political horse race, it apparently struck Pelley as an unusual amount of focus on poverty. And, sadly, he was right.

Poverty as an issue is nearly invisible in U.S. media coverage of the 2012 election, a new FAIR study has found — even though what candidates plan to do about an alarmingly growing poverty rate would seem to be a ripe topic for discussion in campaign coverage.

Even before the economic downturn made the poverty picture significantly worse in the United States, the Urban Institute reported that half of all Americans (51 percent) experience poverty at some time before age 65 (Urban Institute, 9/10/09).

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2011 report (9/11), poverty in 2010 was at a 19-year high, affecting 46 million people, or 15.1 percent of the population. That’s up sharply from 11.3 percent in 2000, and 12.5 percent in 2007. And several groups feel the effects of poverty at a much higher rate than the national average. According to the 2011 census, more than one in five children (22 percent) live in poverty, as do more than a quarter of all blacks (27 percent) and Latinos (26 percent). A 2011 Brookings Institution study (9/13/11) predicted that as many as 10 million additional Americans will join the ranks of the poor by 2014.

You see, this isn't solely a Romney or an Obama problem; it's a concerted bipartisan one. Despite the fact that more and more people are becoming impoverished, neither presidential campaign views poverty as an important issue.

Both candidates talk about a lot of things, but poverty isn't one of them. It seems that whenever one or the other does address domestic economic issues, it solely is put in terms as to how this or that policy impacts the middle class — the class that is disappearing before our eyes!