Poverty Facts

We routinely read about millions living under the poverty line and in reading such figures, poverty makes human life a statistic. We are told that poverty is the fault of the poor. We are told that the poor are lazy.  Such thinking is blatantly false.

  In North America, an estimated 98 million people live in poverty. The United States has 12.7 percent of its population (40 million people) living in poverty; seven and a half percent of Canadians (4.9 million people) live in poverty; and nearly half of Mexico’s population is living in poverty (53.3 million people).

Mexico has a severe problem with 45.4 percent of the population living in poverty. The number is staggering when one considers that Mexico ranks among the top 11 wealthiest countries by GDP.

The United States provides Social Security, food stamps, earned-income tax credit and so on that keep 40 million people out of poverty; without these programs, poverty would be nearly doubled. In addition, half the jobs in the nation pay less than $34,000 a year, according to the Economic Policy Institute; a quarter pay below the poverty line for a family of four — less than $23,000 annually.

According to Citizens for Public Justice, one in seven Canadians live in poverty. The top 10 percent of Canadians hold 47.9 percent of the country’s wealth while the bottom 50 percent hold less than 6 percent. Living Wage Canada says that 70 percent of Canadians living in poverty are working, but not making enough money to cover living costs.  There has been a five-fold increase in minimum wage work in the past 17 years in Ontario.