AP

Were high oil prices partly responsible for the uptick in poverty this year? Yes, say Trevor Houser and Shashank Mohan of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. They pored through the 2011 Census data and found that “over one-third of the increase in the U.S. poverty rate in 2010 resulted from the rapid rebound in oil prices.” (Obviously most of the increase came because incomes are declining.) What’s more, “if oil prices had remained constant at 2001 levels over the past decade, there would be 2.6 million fewer Americans in poverty today. . .”