And thinkprogress got it from a study by the National Poverty Center, you want to criticize them next?
http://npc.umich.edu/publications/policy_briefs/brief28/policybrief28.pdf
I don't question the data, I question the way its presented by left-wing pinheads....the spin.
No one denies there are people in poverty in the country.
The official poverty measure has been criticized for not accounting for several factors that can affect a family's economic well-being and for not having been updated, except for inflation, for four decades.
For example, while cash benefits from government assistance programs are included in a family's income when calculating the official poverty measure, benefits received in-kind such as food stamps, Medicare or Medicaid, employer provided health insurance, housing subsidies, and other social services are excluded. Taxes that families pay and tax credits they receive such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) do not enter into the official poverty determination.
Foreign-born, non-citizens have a higher incidence of poverty, at a rate of 26.7 percent, skewing the figures again.
http://www.npc.umich.edu/publications/policy_briefs/brief28/policybrief28.pdf
The number of U.S. households living on less than $2 per person per day — which the study terms “extreme poverty” — more than doubled between 1996 and 2011, from 636,000 to 1.46 million.
Just by counting the SNAP program as the equivalent of cash, the 1.46 million figure drops to about 800,000....and there are plenty of other assistance programs available...so its a much more complicated subject than just stating a flat figure without context...
Keep in mind we have 315 million people in the country that we know about, and a few million more living in the shadows.......