The following quote demonstrates a major way in which official poverty statistics understate the poverty epidemic:
“While in any given year 12 to 15 percent of the population is poor, over a ten-year period 40 percent experience poverty in at least one year because most poor people cycle in and out of poverty; they don’t stay poor for long periods. Poverty is something that happens to the working class, not some marginal ‘other’ on the fringes of society.” – Michael Zweig, What’s Class Got to do With It, American Society in the Twenty-first Century, 2004