make “working poor” an oxymoron

SusanG over a dKos ties together two stories and asks, “could this report: ‘Family incomes dropped 2.3% 2001-2004, Fed says’ Have anything to do with this report: ‘Food Bank Network Served Over 25M in ‘05’?” She then, correctly, I think, answers her own question with this excerpt from the second story:

The new report, being released Thursday, found that 36 percent of people seeking food came from households in which at least one person had a job.
...
In Washington, the Capital Area Food Bank served more than 383,000 people last year, a 39 percent increase over 2001, said Kasandra Gunter Robinson, the food bank's spokeswoman.

Of those people, nearly half had jobs, she said.

"It is the working poor who are struggling," Robinson said.
...
"Even though the economy might be changing, it isn't creating the kinds of jobs that allow people to make ends meet," Koch said.

I would like to join with SusanG in proposing that the Democrats seize this as a central issue for legislative initiatives and, I’ll add, the fall campaign. If you work, you shouldn’t need a soup kitchen—I think that’s a pretty easy sell. As SG sums up, “the words, ‘working’ and ‘poor,’ should never have a legitimate, fact-based place in the same sentence in the richest country in the history of the world.”