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The number of people living in poverty stood at 46.5 million last year, or 15% of the country’s population. That left the poverty rate at close to the peak since the War on Poverty began in 1965. In this picture people enjoy a meal during this year’s annual Good Friday event at the L.A. Mission.

In this America, people blame welfare for creating poverty rather than for mitigating the impact of it. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll in June found that the No. 1 reason people gave for our continuing poverty crisis was: “Too much welfare that prevents initiative. ”With so many Americans looking at the poor with disgust, no wonder we send so many empathy-challenged lawmakers to Congress.

My family’s newest member popped into the world with this year’s crocuses, just in time for UNICEF’s report card on child well-being. Unbeknownst to our bundle of joy, the country of his birth was down at the bottom of the list of 29 nations, with Latvia, Lithuania and Romania. By the time he had been on Earth a month, the Academic Pediatric Assn. had released its strategic road map, proclaiming poverty the “greatest problem for children in the U.S.” In June, as he moved into Week 12 of newborn life, the Clintons declared all the nation’s kids “Too Small to Fail.”

The recession and its lingering aftermath helped drive an estimated 2.8 million additional American children into poverty, raising the nation’s share of poor children to one of the highest recorded in nearly 50 years.

Poverty is an exam room familiar. From Bellevue Hospital in New York to the neighborhood health center in Boston where I used to work, poverty has filtered through many of my interactions with parents and their children.

“The lack of definition in our definition of poverty is part of the problem; it helps to answer the question of how the richest country in the history of the world could have so many people living in a state of deprivation.”

“The United States is considered the richest, most economically competitive country on the planet. So how is it possible that it also has one of the highest rates of child poverty in the developed world?”

“It’s official: There are now more poor people in America than at any other time in the 52 years records have been kept. We knew that the 2010 poverty numbers, released by the Census Bureau on Sept. 13, weren’t going to be good. They turned out to be, in the words of Brookings senior fellow Ron Haskins, “extraordinarily bad.” More than 15% of Americans live below the poverty line.”

“Here’s a fact that may not surprise you: the children of the rich perform better in school, on average, than children from middle-class or poor families. Students growing up in richer families have better grades and higher standardized test scores, on average, than poorer students; they also have higher rates of participation in extracurricular activities and school leadership positions, higher graduation rates and higher rates of college enrollment and completion…What is news is that in the United States over the last few decades these differences in educational success between high- and lower-income students have grown substantially.”

“Nearly 8 million Americans go to work every day yet still live below the poverty line. That is in part because the federal minimum wage is too low.”