According to the Census Bureau, poverty is on the rise:

In the recession, the nation’s poverty rate climbed to 13.2 percent last year, up from 12.5 percent in 2007, according to an annual report released Thursday by the Census Bureau. The report also documented a decline in employer-provided health insurance and in coverage for adults.

  Almost 40 million Americans–FORTY MILLION–live below the poverty line, which is defined as an income for a family of four of just $22,025.

  I said, from the outset, that for those living in poverty, the boom-and-bust economic cycles are pretty irrelevant–their lives just get worse no matter what. It is true that the current economic calamity has made things much worse. But, it only heightens the crisis.

  While the cost of living goes up, our country has masked, even in "good times", the decline into poverty with the sham of the minimum wage. Increasing the minimum wage relieves the conscience of the country by instilling a false sense of increased well-being. In fact, as I and others have argued, you can’t live on the minimum wage–it is a poverty-level wage.

  But, the middle-class is barely staying outside that descent into poverty. Thanks to the geniuses on Wall Street (the Goldman Sachs-Rubinites who were both incompetent and greedy), median family incomes are wrose than they were TEN YEARS AGO:

In another sign of both the recession and the long-term stagnation of middle-class wages, median family incomes in 2008 fell to $50,300, compared with $52,200 the year before. This wiped out the income gains of the previous three years, the report said.

Adjusted for inflation, in fact, median family incomes were lower in 2008 than a decade earlier.

"This is the largest decline in the first year of a recession we’ve seen since the Census Bureau started collecting data after World War II," said Lawrence Katz, an economist at Harvard University, referring to household incomes. "We’ve seen a lost decade for the typical American family."

  The idea of a "lost decade" is quite an apt description–but it doesn’t go far enough. As I argue (danger: promotion alert) in my new book, "The Audacity of Greed: Free Markets, Corporate Thieves and The Looting of America", we really have gone through a period of three lost decades. Wages have not kept pace with productivity in the past 30 years–and that is the root of our economic collapse, not just the behavior of the criminally negligent captains of the "free market".

  This is a blight on our country no matter when someone declares the "recession" over. I have no patience for the people running around declaring that they detect "green shoots" or a "bottom" to the "recession" because they are ignoring the tens of millions of people who are not part of the "recovery" equation. From the Federal Reserve Board to Congress, there is a deafening silence–a willful ignorance of the plight of our fellow humans beings.

  It is a national scandal.