This is shocking: "Mark Rank, a social welfare professor at Washington University in St. Louis, has written extensively about shifts in U.S. poverty since the 1960s, and finds that Americans today are more likely to face poverty than in the past. According to Rank's data, 24 percent of people who were in their 20s in the 1970s were likely to experience poverty at some point in their lives. That number rose to 31 percent in the 1980s and 37 percent in the 1990s. Today a majority of Americans -- 51.4 percent, according to the Urban Institute -- will experience poverty by the time they're 65."
I pulled this from a governing.com story, "Poverty comes to the suburbs."
The meme of America has long been that each generation builds on the advances of its predecessor. That meme is in tatters at the moment, if half the nation can expect to "experience poverty" at some point.
