Poverty — A Long Slog Ahead

Today's title comes from the PBS NewsHour report on the Census Bureau's new survey of poverty in America. It's Saturday, so I'm going to keep this short. I will be discussing the new Census results in greater detail next week.

Here are the key numbers as reported by PBS—

1. 14.3% — 1 in 7 Americans were living at or below the poverty line in 2009
2. That is 4,000,000 more than in 2008 and the most since 1994
3. The ranks of the working age poor reached its highest level since the 1960's

A true aficionado of America's economic history over the last 30 years will note that we have returned to 1994 poverty levels, which neatly coincides with what I call the Bubble Era (1995-2007). In so far as there are no more bubbles to blow, nothing is going to "save" us now from persistent, high poverty rates in the future. Indeed, that view was put forth by Isabel Sawhill in the PBS report—

And, as Harry noted, this is just the beginning of what is going to be, I'm afraid, a number of years of increasing rates.

We have done some projections at Brookings based on historical data that suggests that the overall poverty rate will probably peak around 16 percent in the middle of the decade, and that it will not be until the end of the decade that it gets anywhere near where it was before the recession started.

So, we have a long slog ahead of us, in terms of a lot of people with low incomes. And once the unemployment insurance benefits that many people have relied on are increasingly exhausted, and assuming the Congress doesn't re-up on unemployment insurance, which I don't think they will, then you're going see even more pain out there.

That says it all. Here's the video.

 

Comments

[rjs]

there’s 16 million multifamily households in that census report that dont count as being in poverty, even though its often an unemployed family moving in with an employed one…

the declining number of households hides the true figures…

http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/pdf/09-16-10_slides.pdf