The New Poor

“While America’s super-rich congratulate themselves on donating billions to charity, the rest of the country is worse off than ever.” Der Spiegel reports on the rising rich-poor gap in the U.S. “In fact, the United States, in the wake of a real estate, financial economic and now debt crisis, which it still hasn’t overcome, is threatened by a social Ice Age more severe than anything the country has seen since the Great Depression. The United States is experiencing the problem of long-term unemployment for the first time since World War II. The number of the long-term unemployed is already three times as high as it was during any crisis in the past, and it is still rising.”