loren mr r. t. patterson new jersey. well the actual number of americans living below the poverty line could be even higher than official figures suggest that's the view of max fraud wall an economist at new school university who says he's staggered by the scale of the problem. well seeing numbers as large one in seven american adults living in poverty in just about one in four to five american children shows us that the sheer numbers and the percentage of americans who are being systematically failed by the american economy and it gives you a little bit of a taking of the temperature of just how severe the pain is there's every indication from the data flow that next year will be worse than this year because the numbers that we're looking at today and in two thousand and nine and we're already three quarters of the way through two thousand and and ten. every trend that made the poverty and the severity of poverty worse last year is very much in place this year and i would also add that we have really high poverty number