By Cliff Montgomery – Sept. 18th, 2011
“Nearly one in six Americans was living in poverty last year, [according to the …] Census Bureau,” declared The Washington Post on Sept. 13th, adding that it is “a development that is ensnaring growing numbers of children and offering vivid proof of the recession’s devastating impact.”
This savage state of economic affairs, brought to a head by years of Wall Street gambles and a lack of serious investment in Main Street, has left “the typical American household earning less in inflation-adjusted dollars than it did in 1997,” added the Post.
The paper pointed out that the Great Recession also has “left 14 million people out of work and pushed unemployment rates to levels not seen in decades.”
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a top economic think tank, on Sept. 14th released a short but highly informative study on the Census Bureau data.
Below, The American Spark offers some key quotes from EPI’s report:
“The 2010 poverty and income data released yesterday morning by the U.S. Census Bureau are yet another reminder of the continued weight of the Great Recession on families in the United States.
“The Great Recession officially ended in the summer of 2009, but the labor market continued deteriorating through the end of 2009, and the modest economic growth in 2010 was not enough to compensate for those losses.
“From 2009 to 2010, the number of jobs fell by 658,000, the unemployment rate increased from 9.3 percent to 9.6 percent, and the share of unemployed workers who had been unemployed for more than six months climbed from 31.2 percent to 43.3 percent.
“Thanks to this deterioration in the labor market, incomes dropped and poverty rose.”
Key Findings From The Census Bureau’s Report
Poverty
- The poverty rate increased from 14.3 percent in 2009 to 15.1 percent in 2010, representing an additional 2.6 million people living in poverty and bringing the total number of people in poverty in the United States to 46.2 million.
- The poverty rate for children was 22.0 percent in 2010, representing 16.4 million kids living in poverty. In 2010, more than one-third (35.5 percent) of all people living in poverty were children.
- The poverty rate for working-age people (18- to 64- year-olds) hit 13.7 percent in 2010, the highest rate since the series began in 1966. Poverty among the elderly (age 65 and older) poverty was statistically unchanged over the year.
- The poor are getting even poorer. In 2010, the share of the population below half of the poverty line hit a record high of 6.7 percent.
- Nearly one in 10 children (9.9 percent) fell below half of the poverty line in 2010, up from 9.3 percent in 2009.
- Non-Hispanic whites maintained far lower poverty rates than any other racial/ethnic group. Blacks were particularly hard-hit by increases in poverty from 2009 to 2010, increasing 1.6 percentage points to reach a rate of 27.4 percent.
- In 2010, over one-third of black children (39.1 percent) and Hispanic children (35.0 percent) were living in poverty. The poverty rate for families with children headed by single mothers hit 40.7 percent in 2010. Of the 7.0 million families living in poverty in 2010, 4.1 million of them were headed by a single mom.
Income
- Between 2000 and 2010, median income for working-age households fell from $61,574 to $55,276, a decline of roughly $6,300, which is more than 10 percent.
- Disparities in incomes among racial and ethnic subgroups grew in 2010, as racial and ethnic minorities experienced particularly large declines in income. The black household earning the median income is now bringing in $5,494 less than the median black household did 10 years ago (a drop of 14.6 percent) and the median Hispanic household is now bringing in $4,235 less than the median Hispanic household did 10 years ago (a drop of 10.1 percent).
- There were losses across the income distribution in 2010, particularly at the very bottom and the very top. In 2010, incomes of families in the middle fifth of the income distribution fell 0.9 percent, for a total decline of 6.6 percent since 2007. Families at the low end of the scale were hit harder, with the bottom fifth losing 3.5 percent in 2010 and 11.3 percent from 2007 to 2010. The top fifth lost 2.7 percent in 2010, but since their losses in the prior two years were modest, the total decline from 2007 to 2010 was a relatively modest 4.5 percent.
- The median, or typical, inflation-adjusted earnings of men working full-time year-round fell slightly from $47,905 in 2009 to $47,715 in 2010, while the median earnings of full-time year-round female workers stayed essentially flat, at $36,877 in 2009 and $36,931 in 2010.
