The Census Bureau reported Tuesday that the official poverty rate in the United States rose in 2007 to 12.5 percent, compared to 12.3 percent the previous year. According to the bureau’s American Community Survey, last year 37.3 million Americans were living below the income level, which, according to the government, signifies poverty.

This is an increase of 800,000, or 2 percent, over the official poverty level for 2006. As damning as the official figures are, the real scale of poverty in the US is much higher. The government set the poverty cut-off point for a family of four in 2007 at $21,203. Such an income means outright destitution. Millions more Americans live in conditions that by any objective standard amount to poverty.

The number of children living below the official poverty line increased much more sharply in 2007, rising to 13.3 million from 12.8 million in 2006, an increase of 3.9 percent. According to the government’s figures, 17.4 percent of American children were in poverty last year

The official poverty rates for both adults and children are considerably higher than their low points in the 1990s. Between 2001 (when the official poverty rate was 11.3 percent) and 2007—a period of economic expansion marked by a massive accumulation of wealth at the very top of American society—the poverty rate rose by 10.6 percent. The rate for 2007 marked the biggest jump in poverty during an economic recovery in US history.

These figures constitute an indictment of American capitalism and both of its major political parties, which have carried out a ruthless policy of tax cuts for the rich, reductions in social programs, and deregulation of big business for the purpose of redistributing the national wealth from the working class to the financial elite and facilitating an orgy of corporate speculation and profiteering.