Cause and effect

This should come as little surprise:

The U.S. poverty rate rose to 12.7 per cent of the population last year, the fourth consecutive annual increase, the Census Bureau said Tuesday...

The last decline in overall poverty was in 2000, when 31.1 million people lived under the threshold — 11.3 per cent of the population...

Sheldon Danziger, co-director of the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan, said the poverty number is still much better than the 80s and early 90s.

“The good news is that poverty is a lot lower than it was in 1993, but we went through a hell of an economic boom,” Mr. Danziger said. “Nobody is predicting we're going to go through another economic boom like that.”

I'm not sure there could be a more obvious connection between political leadership and the poverty rate. But even for Bushco, this is an impressive feat. Based on a rough calculation (1.4% of 300 million people), this means 4.2 million more people in poverty than there would have been under the poverty rate at the start of Bush's tenure. Compassionate conservatism indeed.

We'll see now how many employees of the Census Bureau join the sub-poverty-line group for having the gall to release the facts.