Income Redistribution: Federal Spending Up, and So Is Poverty

We finally found an instance in which Obama administration numbers add up. Unfortunately, we mean it literally -- they really add UP. In 2009 -- or, as we call it, the Early Dark Ages -- newly elected Barack Obama claimed that his $800 billion stimulus would reduce the number of Americans living in poverty by two million. Specifically, he promised his plan would "help poor and working Americans pull themselves into the middle class in a way we haven't seen in nearly 50 years." Besides being dead wrong on that account, in the first two years of Obama's presidency, the number of Americans living in poverty rose by 2.6 million. According to the Census Bureau in 2009, 43.6 million Americans were living below the poverty line. Jump ahead to 2011 and the number climbs to 46.2 million.

And that's not all. During the same period, the number of Americans on food stamps rose from 31.9 million to more than 47.6 million, which, as CNS News points out, represents a 49.3 percent increase and brings the number of food-stamp recipients in the U.S. to more than the entire population of Spain.

In many cases, numbers "adding up" is a good thing, but when they add up to nearly 50 million Americans living in poverty under this administration, there's nothing good about that.