U.S. Poverty Down 3.33%. Except For The Wealthy, Incomes Flat

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Poverty is down, but incomes haven’t budged

By Evan Horowitz

  | GLOBE STAFF   SEPTEMBER 16, 2014

 0 COMMENTS

The number of Americans living in poverty has finally started falling, from 15 percent in 2012 to 14.5 percent in 2013. That’s the best bit of news in today’s big, new Census release, and the underlying cause is just as encouraging: It’s gotten easier for people to find full-time, year-round work.

Not all the news is good, though. Despite the drop in poverty and the improvement in the labor market, incomes stayed flat. Middle-income Americans aren’t just earning less than they did before the recession, they haven’t gotten a raise in 30 years.

Those are the headlines: poverty down, incomes flat. But the trends haven’t affected everyone in the same way.

• Hispanic communities saw the biggest decline in poverty, and the largest increase in income.

• Black and Hispanic people in the United States are still more than twice as likely to be living in poverty.

• The one age group that saw a substantial increase in household incomes was 15- to 24-year-olds.

• Women still earn about 78 percent of what men earn.

How significant is the drop in poverty?

Any decline in poverty is good — it means our slow economic recovery is helping those who need it most. One reason poverty has fallen is because nearly 3 million new people were able to find full-time, year-round work — 1 million women and 1.8 million men.

Still, a poverty rate of 14.5 percent is quite high. Poverty was lower during the entire 14-year period between 1995 and 2009.

With child poverty, too, you find that while the numbers declined in 2013, 1 in 5 children nationwide still live in poverty, substantially more than in 2000.

What happened to incomes?

Incomes aren’t growing, and they haven’t been growing. Not for folks at the bottom, not for folks in the middle, and not even for folks near the top (you have to get to the top 1 percent to see real growth).

The biggest difference between high-income households and everyone else is that the high-income folks made tremendous gains throughout the ’80s and ’90s. Families in the middle didn’t. Their income today is the same as it was in 1985.

Source: Census Bureau

Evan Horowitz digs through data to find information that illuminates the policy issues facing Massachusetts and the United States. He can be reached at evan.horowitz@globe.com.