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Article Artículo

Haitian Elections: Less Parties Allowed, Less Voters Expected
An Inter Press Service article this week reports on widespread discontent with the planned November 28 elections. Surveying people in Port-au-Prince from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds, journalist Judith Scherr reports that Residents of a number

CEPR / October 01, 2010

Article Artículo

CEPR Explains Inequality and Poverty

CEPR senior economist John Schmitt testified on Thursday in front of the Congressional Out of Poverty Caucus on "An Emergency Response to the Crisis of Poverty in America: Understanding the Crisis and Refocusing the Fight." In his testimony, (see his full statement here) John pointed out that:

[E]ven before the Great Recession, the poverty rate was high by historical standards... at the peak of the last business cycle in 2007, one in eight people in this country had an income that we would have considered to be poor a half a century ago. Over the last thirty years, even as the economy grew by almost 70 percent per person, the share of the population that we judge to be poor has actually increased....

But even if we could restore – overnight – the economy to where it was in 2007, poverty would still be unacceptably high. Fortunately, we already know how to lower poverty dramatically. In the 1960s, in less than a decade, we cut poverty by almost half. The keys were economic institutions that linked workers wages and benefits to overall economic growth, and the expansion of the social safety net...

Economic analysts from the White House, to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, to former John McCain adviser Mark Zandi all tell us that the February 2009 stimulus package has created millions of jobs. Without those measures, poverty would have increased even more than it did in 2009. But, we now know that the stimulus program put forth in early 2009 was just not big enough. The single most important step we could take to combat poverty in 2011 is to implement a large -scale stimulus and jobs program today.

CEPR and Nicole Woo / September 30, 2010