countries and they have the ways and means. we find out who was responsible on this action and find out they had communication overseas. after my visit to the american officials here america has committed to this revolution. we have to work together and supportive -- we need more support during peace. how can libya control and let the world know we are serious about democracy? they have a real problem.

left behind -- destruction. we need to start a very good police force and good communication and training and 10,000. ..

then we should be able to create the force. that will help us secure our country and our people. without government showing middle east, north africa, maybe some other places, the government has to show, otherwise people will not obey law and orders. again, my apologies to the american people. it is a sad day in our history. and we hope that we still have the support of the united states and other friends to help libya get through from this terrible critical situation. thank you. >> thank you very much ambassador. and thank you very much to all of you. i am very grateful for your

cooperation and participation in this debate. please feel free to write, to come, to see me, to complain, preach, whatever you want to do. i more than happy. it's our job, we are open. we would ke to see all of you again very soon. thank you very much. [applause] >> join us monday for more about u.s. foreign policy.

>> you're watching c-span2 with politics and public affairs weekdays feature live coverage of the u.s. senate. on weeknights watch key public policy events and every weekend the latest nonfiction authors and books on booktv. you can see past programs and get our schedule at our website, and you can join in the conversation on social media sites. >> next a roundtable discussion on a recently released census report on income, poverty, and health insurance. from today's "washington journal," this is about 50 minutes. >> host: want to show some headlines from the thursday newspapers, beginning with this from the new york times. u.s. income gap rose, sign up and even recovery. household income sinks to 95

level. and below that from reuters, number of u.s. households steady. all of these come from an annual census department report which is titled income, poverty, and health insurance coverage 2011. we have the report you. wilson so the census bureau chief was going to walk us through what the report says, and susan heavey, who we said earlier broke a story off of this for reuters is at our table. welcome to all of you. mr. johnson, what does census do with this annual survey? >> income, poverty, and health insurance, this year we found three important headlines as you saw. median household income, phil 1.5% between 2010 and 2011. poverty remained unchanged at 15%. there's still 46 million people in poverty.

and one of the other headlines you mentioned -- >> people without health insurance? >> uninsured rate. people without health insurance rate. the other headlines you mentioned was there was increase in inequality. >> what is the idea of linking health care coverage into this report on household economy? >> one of the concerned with health care for coverage is how it relates to people's income and people's poverty level, to know who all along the spectrum of income distribution is uninsured. that's why we put it together with this. >> when you look at the overall report, pleasure headline clear to you, the direction you wanted to go with from the numbers speak what this is a mixed picture so did make it difficult to cover because we saw so may different pieces of data on the surface seem to be pointed in different directions. i talked to a lot of economists and they were surprised when the numbers came out because they

had been expecting poverty to go out. so when it was flat, sort of change the picture a little bit. then he saw the income gap and the a lot of economists had been expecting health insurance to be flat as well. that's not a drop. so it offered a pretty mixed picture, and i think what it did was it highlighted the difficulty people were stupid and. this is 2011 data you have to remember even though we're almost at the end of 2012 it takes a while for the census bureau to gather everything. its last year's calendar data. >> when you talk about how you to gather the numbers? >> sure. this comes from operations for the, about 100,000 households around the country. we have hundreds and thousands of data collectors out there. so it's really important, the most important concept, collection is of people out there, the response. we gather the data, we analyze it and create statistics to look

at the poverty and income. it's collective sort of in the spring, asking about the previous calendar year. tax time helps them recall what they got the previous year, it takes six months to process to release in september. >> since you do look at your over your numbers, do you go to the same 100,000 families? >> now. this is the same data that is used for unemployment. we add questions to look at the income data. >> a couple of things as we get into the discussion. we'll be there for 45 more minutes. will time to look at the numbers your. we have changed the full length of the segment. its regional, and will put those numbers on the screen for you as your diving in. you can tweak us @cspanwj. this question that we're asking has been posted on earth facebook page. we are asking for your participation is for you to tell us about your income.

are you seeing signs of change, positive or negative and what you think the cost of that is. we have some the comments people have already added to us. we will share this with you as we go through the numbers. let's begin. we'll start with our first one. real meeting household income. walk us through what we learned from that. >> when you look at the picture you can see the trend in household income, this is real unjustified inflation over this time period. the light blue shaded are the recession it creeps. so you can see the take down at very in, the 1.5% fall, and medium household income is $50,100. roback to the 2007, before the last recession and there's about a fall of about 8%. go back to the previous peak in 1999, about a fall of 8.9%. it's been falling over this time period that for the whole period and has risen.

>> but back in 1967, not loss of gross. median household income is adjusted for inflation, 51. one of the components of household income? >> so, this is what we call money income. it's all the cash from your employer, from their investments, interest, dividends, social security, supplemental security income. anything that is cash that comes into the household. what it doesn't include emphasis on the criticism we heard this we come it doesn't include things like food stamps or your taxes or your earned income tax credit. it's just focusing on the income. >> for the value of your home? >> or the things like the value of your home, the value of your possessions, the value of your car, your health benefits. it doesn't include those think.

>> so it's not assets. >> its income, right. >> you talk to real people out there. what are people telling you about the real effects of these numbers? >> i've heard a couple different things as they got prepared for this. i went out to some different food banks and charities and talk to some people are still really feeling pinched and hurt by the recession. d.c. demand not flat which is ever increasing especially in the food bank. there were a couple of recent piece of information that came out food insecurity recently and on food stamps and we still see a lot of growth. people are having trouble making this basic ends meet. and health insurance aspect is real interesting. i spoke to men is out in california. esau's income drop a lot over the last several years. he's a freelancer does have health insurance and he can't afford because he also has diabetes at the same time his income was going down. and what happened was he in so driving very carefully, he told me. every day he crosses the street

looking a couple extra times because you don't have health insurance, even if you can make do with less income, it can really affect your bottom line and that's something that can put people into poverty very quickly. >> let's start with the facebook comment that questions the basis of this we can talk more about it. i like the stats on how many household and poverty have cell phones, internet, big screen tvs and cable and satellite. i wonder what the poverty level would be if the entire that money they receive would be counted? >> social security is included, and you see with social security, benefits, poverty rate of the elderly falls tremendously. we include tanf and welfare recipients but we don't include like you said the medicaid and medicare contributions. some people look on that. >> want to look at this here. this looks at the real median household income by age of household.

this is for two years, 2010 and 2011. what do you do with these numbers? >> two things you can see from this. you can see this help shape the pattern as we expect. young and the old, both sides have lowered me in income than the middle. 35 to 44 and 55. the other change is over time, there was a fall for people under 65 years age, between 2010 and 2011. there's only a couple specific age groups that had a fall in the income. that's 35-44, and the 55-64. the other interesting thing is we have an increase in the number of people 65 and older. their income is lower. that could've kept the median income down because you add more and more people who are having earning less. that keeps the income that. >> always considered the peak earning years for people, and so we see that they would then be the highest and also they are not experiencing much change in

household income. let me go with the first comment about what's happening in people's home lives. out income has held steady but it certainly isn't buying as much as it did before. inflation israel despite what bernanke thinks. i will ask you to talk about the dead and your view on inflation. >> we saw big action from the fed yesterday. they took some sweeping measures to step in and tried to boost the economy. they will be buying billions of dollars of bonds, treasury bonds and mortgage bonds. and it really shocked the market. we saw stocks go up on the news. they are trying to stepping. their whole job is to try to keep inflation and unemployment down. they haven't acted very much, and we saw them saw in yesterday. it's going to take a while to see over time what it does and whether that affects people's buying power, if you feel more confident to go out and buy more things, or wait for the election and move on from there.

>> another report, my 401(k) bounced up and down during the bush years, mostly down. now it's on the rise but still has not gained what i put into it. this has happened overall to people's investment since 2000 a? >> you can look at the chart and regular income has lost ground since the mid '90s to investment income would also reflect that, where people just haven't caught up to where they were before. >> hello to him to pick your a part of our conversation. >> caller: it's hard to pay bills these days. gas is up, everything. i think c-span, the host and the -- presidential debates. [inaudible] i would like to see her take her shirt -- >> we're going to stop right there. we'll household income. this is the income inequality.

part of the story spent i will have you walk us through and then we will -- >> you can look at this. the blue line is the median household income we saw before. looks fairly flat because we've added a number of other percentile. the median is the income for which 50% of the population, 50% above the. go down to the 10 percentile, that was $112,000 in 2011. you go on the other end, the '90s % out in red, juicy that's $143,600. that's fixed income for which 10% is above that level and you can see the 95th is even higher. so the thing you can see the new start is the and purple line go up a lot more than the blue line and the orange line indicating increased in the gap. >> everybody has experienced some sort of downturn from the

recession. >> the interesting thing is the 90th percentile shows no significant fall between 2010 and 2011. however, the 10th percentile did show a fall of 1.9%. >> and if we look at, this is essentially flat over the course of the several decades. >> again, it looks flat but again you go back to 1967, it was 9600. it's 12,000. so it has increased. go back to 1999, it's been real flat. >> tell me about the politics. >> so, this reinforces the idea of what we already know interesting over time which is that increasing wealth gap in a country where you have the top earners earning more although they were also affected by the recession and yet the bottom earners not any ground, and the middle class is getting narrower and narrower. that's a big issue in this presidential campaign. you have president obama talking a lot about the middle class and he wants policies to reinforce that. and jeff is republican

challenger mitt romney say he can use as private experience, it's about jobs and that he can help boost everyone's living that way. it's become a big issue, this divide in our country. sometimes it can be hard to see so it's interesting you have different regional college because i think the picture nationwide in places like nevada will be did very different than maybe the are here in washington. >> if we look at household assets, would this be larger? because in the two upper percentiles one can assume entire investment. >> there's a lot of other things i going to how wealthy you may feel if you have a car, if you have a house, if you have equity in your house or if you're under water in house. health insurance and other benefits, not just health insurance benefit you might have from your job. they all can help you feel wealthier than you are. at the same time some of the comments have been made is it costs you more to fill up the car or cost you more when you go to the grocery store, even if

your income is the same you're not feeling as good as you did a couple years ago. i think that's something that a lot of people are saying. >> and there's a lot of research on the what's called asset gap. it shows the scenes and live reports on a website but look at this. so i think that would be an interesting thing to compare to the gap. >> there's been some data that you have seen where you might have a job and you might have a paycheck, but maybe you are unemployed for a while and you used up all your savings or have to sell your car or you soldier on and now you're renting and your quote unquote asset poor. so what happens is as soon as you lose your job, now you have no cushion underneath you. that's a big concern for a lot of people, even as they are finding work now. >> this last chart would look at of the difference in household income, a question on twitter. the chart clearly shows some income wealth gap at how much of that is related to education?

>> we do have a number of tables on our website that breaks this out, income tales, poverty tables, break it out by all demographic groups and you look at the education breakdowns. i don't know the results right now but obviously the higher educated have higher income. >> and we have in past programs look at some of those relationships. i encourage you to go to the census.gov website where they have much more of the detail attached to the chart, and also all of the programs we been doing for the past year in america by the numbers are all gathered on the c-span video library on one page but if you want to go back and look at any of the discussion of the many aspects of american society we have been looking at, it's all gathered there for you. let's go back to facebook because were asking people is going to tell us about what's happening in their own household. reminded him if you call in we have regional phone lines, east and central time zones,

mountain/pacific. we'll put the phone numbers on the screen but here's some comments from facebook. people struggle every day. i'm not pointing fingers here. people struggle because of the government or maybe because of health insurance. but some people try their hardest to rise above that even though they struggle, they can beat through it. and foundry tells us yes, her household income is increasing, thank god. and john writes i was raised by parents were married in 1930, the start of the great depression. that was poverty on a massive scale. so do we have a different definition of what poverty is in society today? >> it's a different society i believe that it was 60, 70, 80 years ago. we function differently then. there are some people who say how can you deport if you got a cell phone or if you got a television? that's a criticism that is out there. you've got a car, all you really

poor? on the other hand if you're sleeping in the court or if you have the television are getting basic channels, basic imitation device that people have these days, it is an argument with having and that we're having in congress where people try to figure out how to we deal with poverty and income inequality, what's the government role in handling all of that? >> on the campaign tell the president and even at the convention, they began arguing that the trend lines are all moving in the right direction. we just heard that. a clerk on twitter asks why is that there's a disconnect between what the average joe is experiencing and what the government says it should be feeding? >> i think that's a sentiment you get a lot from people, and if something that we will keep doing for the next two months before the election is that idea for the elected representatives are really doing enough for the people that make of this country, the average working person. i just don't know.

>> does the action by the fed yesterday indicate that the fed has greater concerns than we might discern from the politicians? >> i don't know if it's they have greater concerns but they decided they needed to step in and act. we have been seeing unemployment stay steady, and they have been sitting and watching for a while and they just decided to step in and really take some bold action to try to address it. >> you are welcome to join us by twitter @cspanwj. you can also go to our facebook page and post your response to how your household is doing in this economy. as our guests continue to work the numbers of the latest annual report from the census department on annual household, real household income. i need help with this and. i was looking at this and trying to understand the story. >> i think for the average american had to focus on the distribution, one problem with these. everyone focuses on the headline number and that's the average. that's true. not everyone feels that. the other thing about household

income is that's not the best measure because that's when the household, single person household is $10,00 $10,000 is d the same as a family of four with $10,000. this chart we try to come before the. by family size adjusting. we adjust people's income to a family of four and we look at the distribution and rank everybody by the income and would look at the difference quintiles. so the lowest quintile would be the people at the bottom 20% of the top quintile would be the top 20%. so two things that come out of this chart. what people have called the staircase pattern. so there's a lot of income at the top quintile. so the top 20% of the population owns 50% of all income. that's the highest it's ever been. whereas the bottom quintile owns much less, like 4%. and the middle are in between. in the top 5%, right, are a little over 20%.

they own almost 40% of all the top quintile. the other thing you see is the change over time. between the two years you see the middle quintile and the income and the top of going out. it suggests an increase in inequality across what is households have. >> and the very top, 5%, have gone up at a greater rate. >> right. most of this is at the top, driven by the top 5%. if you look even further it's driven by the higher. so it's the higher income group that has experienced a big increase in income spent i think this chart goes to that viewer's question about people on the ground. it shows a big disparity that we have in this country and it raises the question, so what do you do about that? were a free society as a capitalist economy, you're allowed to go out there and earn as much money as you want, or as you can make, and at the same time what happens to the people

on the bottom of our economy and what can we do if it's been flat for a while? and how does that all even out in the greater scheme of things? also one thing that this chart led a lot of people to watch on wednesday we came it was the idea of taxes and fair tax is exciting to see a lot of talk about that, too, looking at this data. >> another question about changing demographic. that are more workers per household and award in 1967. therefore, the real has decreased dramatically. real income has decreased dramatically. so in 1967 perhaps just one working father might have earned a majority of households today, people, mother and father both working, et cetera. how do you account for that? >> we don't account for that with these numbers but that's one of the issues just like assets, another thing to look at. all of this increase in income over the past 40 years has been

driven by more people working. they are in decreasing their leisure. they're not necessary better off by having that, those jobs. but i think there are people out there that are trying to measure the labor participation and those types of issues. >> next is a call from rob watching as from treasure island florida. you are on, good morning. >> caller: good morning. there's one other area that you haven't addressed and that's underemployment. both my wife and i fall in the over 60 categories and we've seen significant drops in our income. and it's because of underemployment. i don't think it's because that we're doing a bad job of what we do. it's just there is less demand and unfunded mandates that are causing a problem. and we are seeing a significant drop in income. and i fall and at 1.9%, and i

think it's even higher for us over the last five years. probably close to five or 10% per year. >> just to be specific, are you over 60 or over 65? >> transfer we are both over 60. and a couple years i will be eligible for medicare by still plan to work during that period. >> thanks very much. if i go back to this chart he and his wife would fall in this group. and his income is down. you see that in the numbers as well, nationally, correct? >> yes. ec 55-64 had a fall in income as to all households under 65. this can be determined number of different reasons looking out their median income for their work effort. we did find an increase in the number of full-time for your workers. i think help some people of the lower end as you saw big increase a shift from part-time to full-time. i don't think that's what the caller is in but again, this is a problem look at national

numbers as a post your own position. >> that the key demographic. the pre-retirees you might call them, the 50-64, they have been really hurt. there was a hearing earlier this year on this good because long-term unemployment is a big issue as well as addition to unemployment, underemployment like the caller is talking about any situation where this is a group would have lost a job and it's harder for them to rebound. they have been doing a lot of job training, there at that age where employers, although age discrimination is illegal, they're having a harder time getting back in the workforce so they might end up taking something that is below their skill level just to have a job because they're not only not get from medicare or for social security. they just have to hang in there until they're 65. i've talked to a lot of people earlier this year that that's what they were doing. they're trying to hobble little jobs to go here and there. just told him over and over 65th birthday. you hear that a lot. >> it sounds like returning for a new job which push at the

low-end of the experience level. you are trying to replace income and your family that was with many years of experience. >> one will make doctor in virginia was saying she was happy to take a job at the low-end of the latter, if you will, to have something because she couldn't get hired and she felt like she was being discriminated against and why would they want to hire someone who is only going to be there for a few years before they retire? they would rather hire a younger person who can potentially state of longer. >> on twitter, dana tells us about her household income. not spinning and will now spend as long as obama is an office. we are talking about her household economy, look at national numbers and see trends over the past year, and prior decades to the. next telephone call is from houston, and this is kathy was on the line with us. go ahead. >> caller: thank you. i live in houston. this is a right to work state. we call a right to work for food stamps. they will hire you up to 37

hours a week so they don't give you benefits or vacation. or holidays. now, what america has, we have saudi arabia become. give everything to the rich and keep the bank -- fingers crossed and a might trickle down on you. do you know we got? we got legalized corporate slavery. you go to china, remember when u.s.a. used to fight to get child communist and slave labor? now we called it trade partners. why hire an american when you can get a kid and send them to the damn thing, right? my, my husband as an aircraft inspector. they're going to el salvador for 4000 a year. by armed guards and, so why tsa fleischer down, you know, our pledge and fixed by the third world. who knows what they'll do for 100,000? you know, i don't know what it takes what american people to rise up, but it's time to

declare economic treason. >> thank you. anything for her? >> jobs is what it sounds like. i think we'll keep hearing that over and over again for the next several weeks. >> tj writes on twitter, unemployment high, gas and food prices soaring, more people on footsteps, people losing their homes. thanks, obama for hope and change. we will look at some of those numbers about what people are relying on. let's go to her next chart which is actually about men and women's differential in earnings. so what do we have? >> this sort of get the idea that earnings and what's happened over time with people working full-time. so we tried to look at people who are working both men and women working full-time full-year to get a more comparable picture of earnings. you can see there's been a flattening of earnings within over this period. this is what you're hearing other. and the increase in income for women. recently in the past year both of them felt 2.5%.

a lot of this was driven by increasing full-time full-year workers at the lower end. the other thing to look at is the gap. you can see men earn more than women, and the bottom part of the chart shows the ratio of women to men's earnings. it's 77% but it's up from 61% back in 1960. but again it's been pretty flat over the past few years. >> we have a lot of questions related to this chart. first of all, i've seen a lot of reporting on the recession hitting men harder. why is that? >> at the beginning of the recession it was fueled by housing and construction, and those were specifically judges are meant gravitating towards. i have seen some other data about how women have been able to be more flexible in this economy and may be retrained himself a little more towards the industries that are growing. but initially it was housing and construction, but they get spent

women today make up 65% of all college graduates. is an education gap between men and women. so how is that reflected in the job statistics and also the earnings? >> that is a big, big question. there is a big gap and it's still growing between males and females and education to i do know it's going to be reflected in this year's particular data, but years from now we see what's happening right now move up, when as children become adults, i think you might see an impact. and education and investment is something a lot of people talked about in reaction to these numbers saying these numbers show we've got to invest more in education, not just between for girls and boys, but for different racial groups. i think we will talk about those numbers. >> the earnings, women to men earnings ratio, 77 cents on the dollar. that is such a political number. we hear it discussed all the time by the parties. when you go behind the covers, what you really learn? how do you do parity and

comparing like job to like job to arrive at these kind of calculation? >> it's difficult to care those numbers exactly. there's lots of different other measures. the census numbers give us one piece of the pie when you look at how people are doing, how men and women are doing. there's a question women are still falling behind spent how do you compare john? >> we have another data that has more, larger sample so we can break it down by over 500 occupations. when you do that you see some occupations where the ratio is 100% or close to 100%. you see other occupations worth much less. i think also education. if you break it out by a bunch of different categories you will see a lot of differences in the ratios. it again one of the things you can't take 77% as giving you an indicator of a lot of things. you have to look behind all the numbers for the different breakdowns. >> we have a number of twitter folks have been critical of the obama administration.

a freelancer rights the twitter needs be thanking bush for driving america over the cliff and that you be for pushing. bush did this outsourcing of our jobs. talking with you about what's happened to household income, we have about 18 more minutes to go with our two guests. let's look at this chart which looks at household income by race and origin. hispanic origin. >> a couple things you can see from here. you can see the asian household have highest median income spent they are the purple. >> purple at the top. non-hispanic white which is the red at the next highest, and then hispanics in orange, blacks in the blue line have the lowest median household income. >> we have again in past sessions look at educational attainment, and there is a factor here with the demographics, but as you traveled the country, why are asians doing better in society,

and wht are blacks and hispanics declining? >> that's a very complex question. there's been a few other reports have come up fisher looking exactly at the different racial groups and showing asians, and i talked a number different experts. there's a lot of different reasons for it. a lot of it is education. you see a lot of patience coming over and get the postgraduate degrees, and it's very focused in that culture to really focus on education. when you look at the break up, i'll be interested to see next week when the other day because of how that breaks down in education for the different groups but there's been other data that shows for minority groups, hispanics and blacks, education just isn't there. >> the other interesting thing about this chart, that overcome between 2010-2011, non-hispanic white households and -- so again this fall that has occurred is not across all groups spent and

hispanics were once that stood at? >> stood up, flat. they stand out in poverty as well. >> it's not that those groups are not educated groups but it's just that in the struggle to get education resources, there is where the debate is, the idea of how much money goes to our schools and where is what's affecting that. >> i'm thinking back to some of the education charged with patients. there are even subgroups among the patients. east asians, indians and united states have the highest postdoctoral education. so they're getting better education than other parts of the population. next we will take a call from san antonio, texas. you were on the air. >> caller: good morning.

[inaudible] you are the honest people i've ever seen on c-span. what makes me so angry, obama -- [inaudible] how come american people -- [inaudible] you are making their own country look so bad, i don't know. this is beautiful country. >> thank you. she came to this country from turkey calling it a beautiful country. poverty rate, this made headlines let's take a look at that. >> this one shows the top chart in lieu shows the number of people in poverty, and the bottom which is the poverty rate from 1959-2011. as you can see the poverty level and the poverty rate are higher than they were in many other

previous years but there's no difference between 2010-2011. i think it went from 15 to 1%, we stayed with the same number of people. you can tell it is-it has been. the poverty rate was having like a three consecutive increases and now it has leveled off. >> historically one interesting. >> host: look at, 1960s was a so called war on poverty in the united states. when you look at this it seems as though as the percentage of population, the country has made some gains over the years. 22% of the population in poverty in 1959 before anti-poverty programs, 15% today. can you at some its local context to the? >> if you look at this chart we're almost back where we were in the '60s when you look at the poverty rate, 15%. spent on looking farther back, it was at 22%. >> oh, i see. when you look over all, you do

see that. i think the thing to keep in mind is although poverty was taking a plus couple of years and now it's flat, what i hear from a lot of people is there still a lot of people in poverty, even though it has a store to gun down from 22 to 15% to 46 million people are so significant number of people got and other thing is the idea of how do we define poverty. this is the official poverty rate for this country. if you're a family of four that's about $23,000 to be considered in poverty. but there's a lot of critics that say if you're a family of four and two of $24,000, you are hurting just as much even though you're not counted as being in poverty. especially if you're in a major metropolitan area, chicago or l.a. and your family poor and you're not making $30,000, you are going to be hurting. so what this official measure does is look at the really worst off but you still a big segment of people who are not counted,

who are struggling. >> now you hear some critique of the party that unlike in decades past they are not talking about people in poverty in the country. one reporter bed ago national politician was john edwards. used to talk about on the campaign trail about americans in poverty. that seemed like a shift from the '60s and '70s where both parties talked about more. >> you do your a lot of talk about the middle-class and i think a lot of it goes to devote some who vote in our elections. and the middle-class votes, older people are huge voting bloc's. and that's where a lot of the attention goes to. who is going to the polls. >> can you answer this question, what was the inflation adjustment for the '60s poverty rate? the. >> inflation is lower now than it was back then so how do you adjust for inflation? >> poverty threshold that we use

developed way back in the 60. we have updated that with the changes in inflation using the benchmarks. so it increases just by inflation over time. the poverty rate would fluctuate. so there are a number of people that criticize this that made we should use a different updating measure, that's what is reflected here. >> next is widely a new jersey. good morning. >> caller: yes, good morning. i'm sure that this is a very difficult process putting all these numbers together, but i notice that you have the poverty rate in actual numbers of people. now, as it relates to the charge but earlier that is the income percentile figure, do you actually have a number, for

instance, of people he would be at the bottom versus the number of people who are at the to? >> real numbers as opposed to percentages. >> so the quintiles are -- again, the quintiles are 20% of the population so that there's a same number of these people in each quintile, that's how we do. the better way is to look at a table we have, i think we had in the webinar in in the report. it breaks out the poverty rates of people, people who are below 100% who are between 100-200% and so. you can look at the number of people in each of those groups, give you a better sense of the number of people in each category. >> next for our guest is a call from fort myers, florida. hi, michael, you're on. >> caller: hello. i would like to see a survey, if it's been done, on the upper five percentile of income

groups, and find out whether the range of -- is as wide as it once was before the recession. and also find out, you know, basically what these individuals are doing for a living that is a little questionable in the way of monopolistic enterprise, such as banking and energy, et cetera, et cetera do you get when going on that? >> so that our surveys after the look at hiring, the federal reserve has a survey of consumer finances and looked at them tries to oversample those high income people to look, and they look at occupation. i don't know what the results of occupations there are but that is the question a number of people are looking at. >> here's a question on facebook, or comment on facebook about the fed announcement yesterday, and its effect on commodities. danny writes crude oil prices are already climbing after the

fed's announcement. i guess the fed thinks the poor can afford higher gas prices and energy prices as long as the stock market bubble can be inflated a little more. god helps us all when the bubble burst. >> i can't talk too much about the actually affect on commodities versus other aspects of the economy, i think a lot of it remains to be seen how it shakes out. you also have to keep in mind the middle east and we've seen a volatile situation by the past couple days as well. it's a complicated picture. >> people trying to understand what you cash if these statistics. did you take into account the high price of food and gas now compared to the 60? >> again, the inflation rate we use is the one that keeps count of those different prices over time. >> so the answer is yes. this chart, the change in number of people below the poverty threshold. >> this chart tries to answer some questions that event out there. the income measure doesn't quite capture all of the resources.

so we tried to do some estimates of what would happen if we included or excluded different components of income. it has like a lot of numbers. let's focus on the ones that go diagonal. upper left, minus 3.9, that means if we had included snap, or food stamps, and among income we would find that it would be 3.9 million fewer people in poverty. it's not in there so that would make a big impact. the next one, we would find if we include earned income tax credit and money income, 3.1 million children would be lifted out of poverty. alternatively there are two income sources that are included that we could exclude and this is one of one, the big one, unemployment insurance. if we excluded unemployment insurance from people saying, we would find an increase of 126 million people in poverty. so unemployment insurance has a big effect on reducing the poverty rate.

finally social security is the biggest win. we didn't include social security income in money income, 14.5 million more people over the age of 65 would be in poverty. that's basically when toppling the poverty rate. >> this particular chart in catholic a lot of political things going on in this country. >> it does. the age differences that you see here, when you look at children versus adults, and the effects that they have but i don't think it's in this particular chart, but the census bureau has numbers about the number of children in poverty being almost i think 20%. and the number of seniors in poverty is more like 9%. there's a big age gap there and how what we're doing. there's been a lot of concern about we have so many children now living in poverty and what happens to them as they get older and what we will see any future. so i think that's what that chart highlights dramatically. in terms of the politics, yes what this does is it draws

additional attention to all the programs out of. it's not all of the government programs out there, the safety net programs that are put in place to help the poor. there's a lot of debate on that in congress, a lot on the campaign trail. it will be a big question in november. are they doing too much, not enough? and where that all life. that's a huge debate and we for a little bit in the collars, yeah, what about welfare, what about welfare to work requirement, whether the food stamps and this idea, we have this american id we had to pull yourself up from their bootstraps and make something of yourself. ironically even after these numbers come out there have been some other surveys from gallup and pew over the years that shows people's overall confidence and a feeling, it's still up. there. people have this optimism, but as we head into the election the actual debate and the government programs is a big sticking point. >> here's a comment from wendy walker who writes 98% of us will be doing better if we would

return to clinton era tax code, raise cap on social security taxes to 3 million. i wanted to look at one particular benefit, unemployment insurance. the length of payments was affected during this last cycle. there was a cap or limitation put on how many weeks that could be paid out. is that change reflected in this particular set of numbers, or what have been asked to set a number sequence that is reflected to. if you look at lashes table for this, that number was higher. there's been of the analysis does have had we extended that, allow that to be longer, and it would've have been even higher. >> and what does the debate over unemployment insurance rest right now? >> well, that's a question for congress but we are not going to see a lot happening right now the unemployment insurance was

extended as part of that stimulus package. congress is back up, very focused on the farm bill and some very immediate action that they need to take on the fiscal cliff. so it's not clear that we are really going to see any changes with unemployment benefits. >> next is a call from indianola, iowa. shark, good morning. >> caller: hello, susan. thank you very much. [inaudible] he's the only one who mentioned poverty. there is such a thing as middle-class. can you hemi? sorry, anyway, i haven't seen a man since robert kennedy representing as much poverty such as john edwards. anyway, my husband is bedridden with ms. his income has not changed since 1995. and everything -- we had a for most things ourselves. like now, this is our third mattress that he is laying on.

so he doesn't get bed sores. it's $1500. been in my shoes, i have to special build of shoes on one side because i was born with a congenital hip disorder. those are $206. >> i apologize but we are just about out of time to grab only seconds left but because you talked about the effects of how spent on your health, let's close with his. >> the third component of this report was looking at health insurance and the uninsured rate, people living without health insurance but you can see the uninsured rate for all people with 15 points 7% in 2011, down from 2010. the uninsured rate for children in the blue is only 9.4%. and not statistically different from 2010. you can see the gap has increased over the entire period. the uninsured rate has fallen

over the period where for all people it has gone up. >> comments? >> we mentioned earlier the reason for health insurance is included in this is because it does have an impact on people's pocketbooks as you heard from the collar. if you don't have health insurance you have to pay for all that yourself or you don't get the care you need. if you're not well you can't work. it all works together. >> many more detailed reports on the health insurance including where you get it from, private or government or employers. and also how it varies by household income and hispanic origin but we by the time left so thanks to both the you for being here this morning. >> join us for to "washington journal."

>> a look at the u.s. capitol here where both chambers are out of session. we spoke to a capitol hill reporter earlier today about the senate's upcoming agenda. >> david leyton is national correspondent, senators spent the week puzzling over a bill to create a jobs program for

veterans. where does that stand? >> they agreed on amendments in time, and they plan to vote on the 19th. they will take two days off, monday and tuesday for the jewish holiday, then come back to 19th. and they're supposed to finally begin writing this. >> who had objections to it and what were they concerned about? >> there were several reasons this stalled. first of all, if you want the cynical view, is republicans simply were not going to give democrats anything, and democrats of course control the senate. the bill is meant to increase hiring and job turn for veterans, particularly those who served in afghanistan. and iraq. part of the problem was the republican said well, there are other things the government should be doing. they said this is a political exercise, that they don't necessarily need the governments help. senator rand paul is a real critic of the.

he said he would just block the bill entirely for various reasons. he wanted to stop american aid to pakistan and killed they freed the physician help the united states find osama bin laden. in any event this tide of the senate all week. they appear to have reached an agreement and will vote on wednesday the 19th. >> the house finish up their work on the temper spending, the six months been built the continuing resolution that goes with this sentiment. what's the consensus on when the senate might get to? >> they were talking about wednesday, thursday, friday of next week. the senate wants to leave at the end of next week as they want to go home and campaign. they probably would there probably won't be huge controversy over the six-month extension. there will be some debate, heated debate and both sides will talk about how we've got to stop this runaway spending. we've got to do something about the debt and deficit. then they will say but we will do it in march.

>> with her eyes on the exit for the election and what are some of the key items that will be of left before the election? them when they come back what has to be done? >> start with the bush tax cuts. the bush-era tax cuts of 2001-2003. expire at the end of 2012. if not extended, then as you know the top income tax rate goes up to 39.6, and the second way to extend their, rates across the board go by. the obama administration would like to keep current rates for those earning under 250,000 pounds, 200,000 for individuals, and let the rates go up for the rest. republicans say no come you don't raise taxes in the middle of an economic slump. that will be an enormous battle. we expect that probably will not be resolved until maybe new year's eve. then you have to sequester come into effect in january. that is the automatic spending cuts at the white house talked about friday and said disaster

was looming if these cuts go into effect. it is a way out, and the way out of course is to fashion a budget, fashion a plan that would avoid these cuts. will that happen? possibly. both sides are motivated for all kinds of reasons. i think what we're going to see come november, december, are just all kinds of very intense, serious late-night, early morning negotiations with some kind of resolution likely mid-to-late december. >> david lightman, national correspondent for mcclatchy newspapers. thanks for the update. >> pleasure. thanks for having me. >> cautiously optimistic. something is happening which is great. this is what i call in the book and in the title the awakening. and the awakening is the awakening of the arab mind, the intellectual resolution with people understanding yes, it's possible. ..

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