Officially, the Great Recession ended in 2009.  But after three years of “recovery,” there were 6.7 million more people living in poverty than in 2008, a recession year.  We’ve been stuck with 15 percent of our people in poverty for three years.  In the 2008 recession year, 13.2 percent were poor.  Forty-six million poor people is a big and troubling number.  But that is only part of the story of unshared recovery.  More than one-third of us – 106 million people – are near poor, living one lay-off or health disaster away from very hard times.  (For a family of four, if your income was below $23,492 you were considered poor in 2012; near poor is defined as below $46,984 for a family of four, or below $36,568 for a three-person family.)