According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, more than 25 percent of Americans would have been poor last year if not for the social safety net.
The safety net was responding to the downturn even without the Recovery Act initiatives. Between 2007 and 2010, the share of Americans that the safety net kept out of poverty rose from 9.5 percent to 10.8 percent. This increase mostly reflects the growth of programs like unemployment benefits and SNAP, which expand automatically to help people hit by the recession and then shrink as the economy recovers.
But these automatic increases wouldn’t have been enough by themselves to prevent a large increase in poverty in the recession. Without the temporary Recovery Act initiatives, the poverty rate would have jumped from 14.9 percent to 17.8 percent between 2007 and 2010, and 6.9 million more people would have become poor than actually did.
Graph of the Day: Poverty on the Rise in America
By Benjamin Landy
According to new data released today by the Census Bureau, the percentage of Americans living in poverty rose to 15.1 percent last year, the highest level of poverty since 1993. In 2010 A record 46.2 million people were below the poverty line, defined as income less than $22,314 a year for a family of four and $11,139 for individuals. It was the fourth consecutive year that the number of people in poverty has increased in America. Real median household income fell 2.3 percent to $49,445—lower than it was in 1997 and barely a 25 percent improvement since the 1960s.
Unsurprisingly, the Census data shows that the Great Recession only exacerbated longstanding economic disparities between geographic regions and racial categories. In 2010, the poverty rate varied significantly in the United States, with Blacks, Hispanics, and the southern states experiencing far greater economic hardship than Whites, Asians, and the northern states.
The highest poverty rates in the nation belonged to Mississippi, Louisiana, and Washington, D.C.—each with approximately one out of every five people living in poverty—while New Hampshire enjoyed the lowest rate, with just 6.6 percent below the poverty line.
The 2010 Census data also confirmed that economic inequality between racial groups in the United States remains a major obstacle to social justice, with the poverty rate for Blacks nearly three times that of Whites. While poverty rates increased across the board, the setback was particularly dramatic for Blacks and Hispanics, erasing several years of economic gains.
The ‘Depravity of the Poor’
David French, writing for National Review Online, explains that there’s nothing wrong with the poor except a bit of old-fashioned depravity:
It is simply a fact that our social problems are increasingly connected to the depravity of the poor. If an American works hard, completes their education, gets married, and stays married, then they will rarely — very rarely — be poor. At the same time, poverty is the handmaiden of illegitimacy, divorce, ignorance, and addiction. As we have poured money into welfare, we’ve done nothing to address the behaviors that lead to poverty while doing all we can to make that poverty more comfortable and sustainable.
It’s worth conceding off the front end that this is, in a sense, true. A two-earner family (“gets married, and stays married”) both of whose adults “work hard” for 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year at minimum wage jobs will earn $29,000 a year. That would put you above the poverty line even with two or three kids. That said… what if dad runs off, leaving mom with the three kids and having trouble working full-time consistent with her child-raising responsibilities? We turn around and say that we need to withdraw your public assistance in to make an example out of you for others?
… what if dad is abusive?
… what if a pile of misguided Wall Street shenanigans lands the country with a 9 percent unemployment rate and you can’t find work?
… what if you didn’t finish school seven years ago and now you’re 24?
… what if you got hooked on heroin?
Now I suppose you could argue that the availability of drug treatment programs, battered women’s shelters, and food kitchens creates “moral hazard” and encourages people to become heroin addicts and/or bed down with abusive partners. But I don’t think that this is a very plausible story. People don’t become homeless drug addicts because the downside to being a homeless drug addict isn’t severe enough in the contemporary United States. And affluent parents don’t treat their children in this kind of punitive way. If a prosperous teenager develops an addiction problem, he’ll be given help. Any halfway responsible parent with the means to do so would bail out a daughter whose live-in boyfriend is abusing her. Poor people have, typically, made some mistakes in life and it’s often the case that had they lived lives free of error, they wouldn’t be poor. But it’s not like middle class people are living mistake-free lives. The difference is that middle class people have lives that give them a fair margin for error, whereas people who start out in bad circumstances can be crippled by a bit of misfortune, impulsiveness, or bad decision-making.
Reblogged: Owning a Refrigerator Does Not Make You Middle Class
What You Need When You’re Poor: Heritage Foundation Hasn’t a Clue
By Melissa Boteach and Donna Cooper, via Center for American Progress
The majority of the American people strongly oppose the passage of debt and budget deals that harm the middle class, devastate the lives of poor families, and ignore the realities of our still sputtering economy. Yet the conservative majority in the House of Representatives and their like-minded colleagues in the Senate have now forced through cuts to bedrock federal programs that underpin America’s middle-class and low-income families—just when they thought things couldn’t get worse.
To help justify this assault, the Heritage Foundation released its latest distorted picture of poverty in America. And, as usual, Rush Limbaugh could be counted on to perpetuate these distortions through the airwaves. The purpose: To suggest poor families have it too good for the government to worry about them anymore. The report relies on old data from before the Great Recession of 2007-2009 to pitch the argument that the poor are doing just fine because they have it all—refrigerators, microwave ovens, window unit air conditioners, televisions, and cell phones.
These arguments are mean and misleading on several accounts. First, the electronic devices that Heritage cites are everyday necessities today. Who has iceboxes anymore? Who doesn’t need a cell phone to find a job or keep one? Fortunately, these appliances are all significantly cheaper these days, but not so the real everyday basics such as quality child care and out-of-pocket medical costs, both of which have risen much faster than inflation, squeezing the budgets of the poor and middle-class alike. In fact, if anything, those who we consider poor today are far more out of the social mainstream in terms of their basic income than when our poverty measure was first set in the 1960s.
