30% Of (USA) Americans Rapidly Approach Poverty; meanwhile Brazil lifts 13% of its population out of poverty with a mandate of eliminating it by 2015!!!

A shocking report from Brookings exposes just how massive America's poverty problem is. America's poor have been rocked by the dual economic downturns since 2000. The result is that poverty grew at twice the rate of U.S. population growth from 2000 – 2008 during the Bush administration, and now encompasses 50 million Americans.

Now let’s turn to an emerging market…Brazil.

On a cool July evening, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff hosts a cocktail party for 50 leaders of her governing coalition, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its November issue. Speaking from the foot of a red-carpeted staircase in the living room of Alvorada Palace, where she lives with her mother and aunt, Rousseff tells the gathered politicians that these are the best times for Brazil, according to four people who attended.

“The world is going through economic and financial turbulence,” says Rousseff, who’s dressed in a black pantsuit. “But we’re living through a great moment.”

In a toast, Dilma, as she’s known to almost all Brazilians, juxtaposes the task of managing the country’s new economic prosperity with U.S. President Barack Obama’s struggle with the Republicans to get the U.S. government budget under control.

“And up there, they only have two parties,” she jokes.

Brazil has 27.

Rousseff, 63, inherited just about everything a president could want from her mentor and predecessor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva: an economy growing at a 7.5 percent annual pace and unemployment, at 5.3 percent, that was the lowest since at least 2001. Brazil’s Bovespa stock market index rose six-fold during Lula’s eight-year tenure, as iron ore, soybean and sugar exports boomed, driven in large part by demand from China.

Lula pulled 24.5 million people out of poverty in his years in office, according to data compiled by the Getulio Vargas Foundation, and Rousseff says that in the next four years, she will eliminate extreme poverty in Brazil.