By Kel Munger, Sacramento Bee

If you don’t think you know any poor people, think again.

According to Sacramento journalist and author Sasha Abramsky, we all know someone who is economically insecure. “If you knock on doors in your neighborhood, you’ll find someone who has needed food assistance, someone who is underwater on their mortgage, or someone who lost their job and their savings in the recession,” he said.

Abramsky is a fellow at Demos, a progressive public policy institute. He’s also a research affiliate at the UC Davis Center for Poverty Research and a contributor to The Nation and Salon. In the course of researching his new book, “The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives”, he visited roughly two dozen states and interviewed more than a hundred people to report on the financial instability that affects so many in the United States.

“Everyone knows someone who is experiencing poverty,” Abramsky said. “This is the single most common shared experience in modern-day America.”

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