Poverty Scorecard for Congress

The Shriver Center has just released the 2007 Poverty Scorecard: Rating Members of Congress. The collected stats are interesting.

Members of Congress from states with high rates of poverty are less likely to support anti-poverty measures than other members of Congress …

[The scorecard] assigns letter grades to each member of the United States Senate and House of Representatives according to their voting records on the most important poverty-related issues that came to a vote in 2007, including legislation on affordable housing, health care, education, labor, tax policy and immigrants’ rights …

In general, states whose Congressional delegations generally opposed anti-poverty measures are clustered in the south and western parts of the country. States whose delegations had the worst voting records and highest poverty rates were South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Kentucky and Arizona.