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A county that's home to 1.56 million poor people should probably do something about poverty, don't you think?
According to the latest Census Bureau report, the number of people in L.A. County living below the poverty threshold of $10,956 for a single person or $21,954 for a family of four rose dramatically between 2008 and 2009. And if a million and a half people living in dire poverty isn't bad enough, consider also the hundreds of thousands of employed L.A. residents who are barely getting by. The Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE) calculates that 29% of full-time workers in L.A. County earned less than $25,000 last year. That's a lot of Angelenos who have either no job or a crummy one.
And it's not looking like the great American private-sector jobs machine will ride to the rescue. The Federal Reserve calculates that American corporations are currently sitting on roughly $1.8 trillion in cash. With a rising level of U.S. corporate sales and production located in other nations, American big business has managed to reap record profits without having to expand production or hire new workers here at home. At the same time, small businesses, are still struggling to get loans....