Census Paints Picture of Poverty’s Disparate Impact – Do We Need Stronger Policies?

• The U.S. Census Bureau recently reported that 12.3 percent of Americans experienced poverty last year, down from 12.7 percent the year before.
• A disproportionate number of those people were children, single moms, minorities, and disabled.
• Two million of them were working full time, but their pay was so low that they remained below the poverty line.

General trends

Last year’s poverty rate was way better than 22.4 percent in 1959, according to our partners at USAFacts, a non-partisan, not-for-profit civic initiative aimed at making government data accessible and understandable. But it was more than the 1973 low of 11.1 percent.

Some groups fare far worse than others on poverty measures.

Poverty measurement

According to USAFacts, the Official Poverty Measure is based on the cost of a minimum food diet multiplied by three to account for a family’s expenses. It doesn’t vary by geography, and excludes some government benefits. While many view this measure as imperfect, it’s still used to allocate program funding.

The official definition of poverty in the U.S. is household income below $24,858 for a family of four with two children.

Vulnerability varies

USAFacts data show that poverty varies by demographics:

• Eighteen percent of children younger than 18 live in poverty, the highest among age groups.
• Twenty-two percent of black people live in poverty, compared to 19.4 percent of Hispanics and 8.8 percent of non-Hispanic whites.
• Across family types, poverty rate is highest among single mothers at 35.6 percent, compared to 17.3 percent for single fathers and 10.5 percent for single people without kids.

On a related measure, 12.3 percent of Americans experienced food insecurity in 2017, according to USAFacts.

The share of working-age, disabled adults in poverty has doubled in the past 30 years, rising from a 10.9 percent share of the working-age poor in 1986 to a 20.5 percent share in 2016. A quarter of working-age adults with a disability lived in poverty in 2017.

In 2016, there were more than two million Americans who worked full-time all year, but did not earn enough to work their way out of poverty. In 2017, that number was nearly unchanged. Stagnant wages have contributed to this situation.

There has been little growth in the real median hourly wages of American workers in the past forty years, with increases at the top masking significant wage stagnation at the bottom. From 1979 to 2016, real wages shrunk by 1 percent for the bottom quintile but grew by 27 percent for the top.

What do you think?

Do we need stronger policies to combat poverty in the U.S.? Why or why not? Hit Take Action to tell your reps what you think, then share your thoughts below.

—Sara E. Murphy

(Photo Credit: Sara E. Murphy)