Despite America’s slowly reviving economy, a record 46.5 million Americans are living in poverty and the nation’s poverty rate remains stuck at 15 percent, including 25.6 percent of Latinos.
More than one in seven Americans live in poverty, not statistically different from the 46.2 million impoverished Americans in 2011, the sixth straight year the rate had failed to improve, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday. The median income for the nation’s households was $51,017, also unchanged from the previous year after two consecutive annual declines, while the share of people without health insurance did improve – but only slightly, from 15.7 percent to 15.4 percent.
The statistics are a discouraging lack of improvement and an unwelcome benchmark for President Barack Obama’s recovery plans.
Blacks had the highest rate at 27.2 percent, compared to 25.6 percent for Hispanics and 11.7 percent for Asian-Americans. Whites had a poverty rate of 9.7 percent.
The latest poverty numbers add to a dismal Census data which shows the rate of unemployment among families earning less than $20,000, living in poverty, has topped 21 percent, nearly matching the rate for all workers during the 1930s Great Depression. This is part of a larger trend showing the gap in employment rates among America’s highest-and lowest-income families has stretched to its widest levels since officials began tracking the data a decade ago, according to an analysis of government data conducted for The Associated Press.
“We’re in the doldrums, with high poverty and inequality as the new normal for the foreseeable future,” said Timothy Smeeding, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in income inequality. “The fact we’ve seen no real recovery in employment and wages means we’ve just flatlined.”
Mississippi had the highest share of its residents in poverty, at 22 percent, according to rough calculations by the Census Bureau. It was followed by Louisiana, New Mexico and Arkansas. On the other end of the scale, New Hampshire had the lowest share, at 8.1 percent.
The last significant decline in the national poverty rate came in 2006, during the Bush administration and before the housing bubble burst and the recession hit. In 2011, the rate dipped to 15 percent from 15.1 percent, but census officials said that change was statistically insignificant.
For the past year, the official poverty line was an annual income of $23,492 for a family of four.
