- U.S. poverty rate and incomes remained stagnant in 2014, report says, By Don Lee, September 16, 2015, Los Angeles Times: “Despite steady job growth and a sizeable drop in the unemployment rate, the nation’s poverty rate showed no improvement last year, and the typical American household, once again, saw no real gain in income…”
- Health care gains, but income remains stagnant, the White House reports, By Robert Pear, September 16, 2015, New York Times: “Nearly nine million people gained health insurance last year, lowering the ranks of the uninsured to 10.4 percent of the population. But there was no statistically significant change in income for the typical American household in 2014, the Obama administration said on Wednesday…”
- Household income, poverty numbers stay about the same, By Jesse J. Holland (AP), September 16, 2015, Christian Science Monitor: “The wallets of America’s middle class and poorest aren’t seeing any extra money, the U.S. Census reported Wednesday, a financial stagnation experts say may be fueling political dissent this campaign season. The Census Bureau, in its annual look at poverty and income in the United States, said both the country’s median income and poverty rate were statistically unchanged in 2014 from the previous year…”
- American wages remain at 1997 levels as recovery fails to lift middle class, By Jana Kasperkevic, September 16, 2015, The Guardian: “On average Americans are still earning the same wages they were in 1997 and 46.7 million are still living in poverty, seven years after the 2008 crash, according to the US census bureau…”
Tag: Supplemental Poverty Measure
Poverty Measurement
Who’s poor? Depends how you measure it, By Amy Crawford, March 1, 2015, Boston Globe: “As Mitt Romney flirted with the idea of a third presidential run in January, the former Massachusetts governor called for a new war on poverty in America. Romney’s remarks, which briefly got both parties talking about the issue, were surprising not only because he had drawn flak during his 2012 campaign for claiming that he was ‘not concerned about the very poor,’ but also because American political discourse has always focused more on the frustrations of the middle class than the struggles of the least fortunate. One reason politicians target their appeals to people in the middle of the socioeconomic scale is pragmatic: They are more likely to vote than those at the bottom. But it’s also because poverty is a particularly intractable and confounding problem. As a culture, we’re not sure how to explain who ends up in poverty—whether they’re disadvantaged by the system, lazy, or just unlucky. In fact, we can’t even agree on what poverty means…”
Supplemental Poverty Measure
- Report: Kansas child poverty would double without government aid, By Jonathan Shorman, February 25, 2015, Topeka Capital-Journal: “Twice as many Kansas children would be in poverty without government aid, a new report shows. According to just-released data from Kids Count, a data project of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, government programs have kept about 103,000 children out of poverty in the past few years. Kansas’ child poverty rate, which stands at 15 percent under the Kids Count measure, would rise to 30 percent without assistance…”
- Government programs cut state’s child poverty in half, report says, By Katie Johnson, February 25, 2015, Boston Globe: “More than 220,000 children in Massachusetts were kept out of poverty with the help of government assistance — reducing the child poverty rate by half, according to a report to be released Wednesday. Nationwide, state and federal programs such as tax credits, nutrition and energy assistance, and housing subsidies cut the child poverty rate from 33 to 18 percent, keeping more than 11 million children out of poverty, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a Baltimore philanthropy that helps children at risk of poor educational, economic, social, and health outcomes…”
- Decades-old poverty measurements inaccurate, says report by Annie E. Casey Foundation, By Mike Averill, February 25, 2015, Tulsa World: “Decades-old poverty measurements fail to show the effect of programs designed to combat childhood poverty, according to a new report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. ‘Measuring Access to Opportunity in the United States,’ released Wednesday by the foundation, points to the Supplement Poverty Measure as a better index for measuring poverty because, unlike the official federal measurement created in the 1960s, this method captures the effect of safety-net programs and tax policies on families. When using the U.S. Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, the rate of children in poverty in Oklahoma drops from 30 percent to 14 percent, according to the report…”