Poverty and Income in 2007: A Look at the New Census Data and What the Numbers Mean

Transcript

REBECCA BLANK: The question is, what does all this mean, and where are we going from here? 2008 as I noted is by every measure going to be a worse year. These numbers are going to deteriorate. Whether we're going to end up in a recession or not all looks a little bit uncertain. Certainly we've avoided the official definition of a recession so far which is negative GDP growth, but clearly there are going to be increasing problems in growth and poverty and higher unemployment particularly among less-skilled workers and that's going to make all these numbers look worse.

At the same time, poverty is on the agenda as Ron notes. It's been on the agenda for the candidates and it's going to be on the agenda this presidential election. So what should we be doing about this? That's a really hard question to answer if you take as true the fact this is all about distribution. If the problem is this pulling away of the upper half and if you think that is due to technology and globalization and a variety of factors that we don't know how to turn around and probably don't want to turn around very much - the economist speaking - and some of you may disagree with that, it becomes hard to think you're going to change some of that distributional story.

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