You can't help but wonder what information people use to decide on who to elect.  Consider this map based on data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census (Link to data source).  This map provides you with the distribution of poverty percentages by county in 2009.  The red areas are the areas with the highest levels of poverty. 

There is an interesting relationship between the states with the most counties with high levels of poverty and the voting paterns of those states.  The political red states are also the poverty red states.  It is certainly an oversimplification to suggest that there is a cause and effect relationship in either direction.  That said, it is hard not to puzzle over why the states with the highest level of poverty tend to support politicians that are the least willing to take steps to address poverty.

I am not talking about opposition to welfare.  I am talking about politicians who eschew funding for a vast array of services that serve to provide people with the education and support systems to rise out of poverty.  The question is if our national economy can effectively recover with so many people living in poverty.  

Economists are increasingly discussing the potential problems associated with high levels of poverty and wider and wider gaps in the distribution of income.  This is often cast off as a form of class warfare, but the wider issue is the degree to which we are in the midst of a decline in our standard of living. It's nice to believe that poverty is something that anyone can rise out of given hard work.  If it were only so.