President Barack Obama talks abut taxes Friday in Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House campus in Washington.A few weeks ago, the Federal Reserve pointed out that recent economic losses have been so severe that the median U.S. family has only about as much wealth as it had in the early 1990s. Thus two decades went down the financial drain in the space of a few years.
The Fed attributed a lot of that drop to the plunge in the housing market. By one estimate, U.S. households have lost a total of $7 trillion over the past six years because of the fall in home prices.
But homes worth vastly less than what people still owe on them are not the scariest thing about the current economy.
More than a dozen think tanks, economists and professors from across the political spectrum weighed in on a recent survey by The Associated Press on the country’s economic prospects, and it would be a reckless understatement to call their predictions troubling.
They overwhelmingly believe that when census figures for 2011 come out this fall, poverty in the United States will have risen from 2010’s 15.1 percent — to as high as 15.7 percent. They estimate that in 2011, almost 50 million Americans were living below the official poverty line of around $22,000 for a family of four.