The expanding poor

President Obama needs to hope he can develop Teflon qualities — the kind presidents Ronald Reagan and Franklin D. Roosevelt had. Reagan seemed unfazed by the Iran-Contra scandal. FDR won a third term despite policies that had done nothing for eight years to improve an economy mired in Depression.

The Obama administration has faced some bad news lately. Health care reform is going to cost more than originally thought. Congress hasn’t followed through by cutting Medicare reimbursement rates, which was a core piece of the original plan. The editorial page editor of the Detroit News wrote this week that Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., may have been rude when he shouted “You lie!” to the president during a speech to Congress last year, but he was right. (Read it here.)
And now comes a Census Bureau report showing the number of poor increased sharply in 2009. (Read it here.)
Obama’s response was predictable. Things are bad, yes, but they would have been even worse without his policies, he said. (Read it here.)
The poverty rate is 14.3 percent, and there is little reason to believe it has gotten any better over the past year. In this story, Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, is cited as saying the rate will rise to 16 percent and stay high for much of this decade.
How on earth could this be if Obama’s stimulus packages and his plan to raise taxes on the rich are supposed to work?