{"id":2152,"date":"2013-09-19T10:00:01","date_gmt":"2013-09-19T16:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/?p=2152"},"modified":"2013-09-20T11:54:15","modified_gmt":"2013-09-20T17:54:15","slug":"poverty-rate-and-income-stagnate-as-conservatives-attack-the-safety-net","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/poverty-rate-and-income-stagnate-as-conservatives-attack-the-safety-net\/","title":{"rendered":"Poverty Rate and Income Stagnate as Conservatives Attack the Safety Net"},"content":{"rendered":"

by\u00a0Zo\u00eb Carpenter<\/a>, The Nation
\nclick here for original article<\/a><\/p>\n

Exactly five years since the onset of the financial crisis, income\u00a0data<\/a>\u00a0released this morning by the Census Bureau indicates that the spike in poverty triggered by the recession has become the status quo. Middle-class incomes are stagnant, too.<\/p>\n

The numbers come as House Republicans move to kick as many as 4 million Americans off food stamps by\u00a0cutting $40 billion<\/a>\u00a0from the program. In their budget proposals, conservatives are also proposing to maintain the deep sequestration reductions that have cut tens of thousands of young children out of Head Start, as well as childcare assistance, Meals On Wheels for seniors, unemployment benefits, and housing assistance.<\/p>\n

More than 46 million Americans lived in poverty last year, representing 15 percent of the population. For three years now there have been more Americans in poverty than at any other point since the Census Bureau began collecting data in 1959, and the poverty rate is hovering at its highest level since 1997. While many economists had hoped to see a small decrease in the poverty rate, the only statistically significant change was the additional 300,000 elderly Americans who fell below the poverty line.<\/p>\n

\"poverty_rate_img<\/p>\n

\u201cThis far out from the great recession it would have been really nice to see gains to income, and reductions in poverty and large increases in health insurance coverage, and we didn\u2019t see any of that,\u201d said Elise Gould, an Economist at the Economic Policy Institute. Overall, she said, the Census figures show that the economic recovery has passed over most Americans. \u201cWhen I think about economic growth, I think about economic growth for everyday Americans. There we\u2019re talking about median households, median families; we\u2019re also talking about people at the bottom.\u201d<\/p>\n

The numbers show that poverty grips women and children particularly fiercely. More than a fifth of all children live in poverty; one in three poor Americans are children. Inequality across race persists, too, with more than a quarter of black and Hispanic Americans living in poverty, compared to just 9.7 percent of whites.<\/p>\n

While the poverty rate rose for both women and men during the recession, the percentage of men in poverty last year was still lower than it has\u00a0ever<\/em>\u00a0been for women. Joan Entmacher, the vice president of Family Economic Security at the National Women\u2019s Law Center, said that decades of unequal wages along with the uneven effects of the recession account for the gender gap. \u201cThe jobs that are coming back in this recovery, especially for women, are very low wage jobs. And there aren\u2019t enough of them,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\"gender_gap<\/p>\n

Entmacher also pointed to the Census\u2019 finding that nearly half of children living in single-parent families headed by women are poor. \u201cIf you\u2019re concerned about child poverty and the way it stunts children\u2019s life chances then you have to be concerned about the poverty rate for women,\u201d she said. Reductions in social programs like food stamps and Head Start are particularly devastating to mothers. \u201cChildcare\u2026is absolutely critical if low income women are going to be able to enter and stay in the labor force, but those supports have been cut back,\u201d said Entmacher.<\/p>\n

The entrenchment of poverty in American society is alarming on its own, but it is particularly striking in the shadow of a massive rebound in the stock market and in corporate profits. The Census\u2019 measure of inequality in 2012 is on par with the all-time high found the previous year.<\/p>\n

The recovery has simply missed most Americans, with the upturn\u2019s benefits accruing largely at the upper echelons of society: the top 1 percent has\u00a0captured<\/a>\u00a095 percent of the income gains made since the recession. While income grew by more than 30 percent for the 1 percent between 2009 and 2012, all other Americans together made gains amounting to less than half-of-one percent.<\/p>\n

\"median_income<\/p>\n

The median income in 2012 was $51,017, still about 8 percent lower than in the year before the financial crisis. But incomes were already falling before the crash; in fact, the peak median income came in 1997. Poverty, too, has been rising since the late 1990s. \u201cIt\u2019s really not surprising that we\u2019re seeing flat or stagnant incomes and poverty rates because employment growth has been so modest,\u201d said Gould. \u201cThis recovery\u2026[is] really on the tail of thirty years of policies that have been put in place that aren\u2019t really benefiting everyday Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n

President Obama acknowledged as much in his speech on Monday. \u201cThe trends that have taken hold over the past few decades of a winner-take-all economy\u2026have been made worse by the recession,\u201d he said, and went on to make the case that \u201cwhat happens up on Capitol Hill\u201d during the current budget showdown is critical to reversing the slide.<\/p>\n

Instead of pursuing policies to promote employment and wage increases at the bottom and middle, however, Congress is poised to enact fiscal policies that hit the vulnerable even harder. The proposed Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program cutbacks are particularly outrageous, but even President Obama\u2019s budget proposal includes a change to the way inflation is calculated that would amount to\u00a0both a benefit cut and a tax increase<\/a>\u00a0for seniors. The tax reforms coming together in the Senate Finance Committee will\u00a0likely include<\/a>\u00a0a lower corporate tax rate, without doing much for poor and middle-class families. It seems unlikely that Congress will lift the sequester anytime soon, which means continued reductions in the social safety net.<\/p>\n

The Census figures show that such spending is more essential than ever, as it is these programs rather than the uptick in the economy keeping heads above water. According to the Census, 1.7 million people avoided poverty last year thanks to unemployment insurance. Although neither SNAP benefits nor the Earned Income Tax Credit are counted in the poverty rate, the two programs lifted a combined 9.5 million out of poverty in 2012. And though the full effects of the Affordable Care Act haven\u2019t yet been felt, the level of uninsured Americans continued to fall last year, and the number of uninsured children reached an historic low.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by\u00a0Zo\u00eb Carpenter, The Nation click here for original article Exactly five years since the onset of the financial crisis, income\u00a0data\u00a0released this morning by the Census Bureau indicates that the spike in poverty triggered by the recession has become the status quo. Middle-class incomes are stagnant, too. The numbers come as House Republicans move to kick […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2153,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/food_insecurity_ap_img.jpg?fit=313%2C388&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2152"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2152\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2162,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2152\/revisions\/2162"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2153"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}