As Trump Boasts About Economy, New Data Show Poverty Rate Virtually Unchanged

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-boasts-economy-data-show-222359780.html


Sarah Ruiz-Grossman,HuffPost•September 12, 2018

New data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that, despite overall increases in household income for Americans since last year, the nation’s poverty rate has essentially stagnated.

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This stagnation came after several years of significant declines in the poverty rate: Since 2014, it has fallen 2.5 percentage points, from 14.8 percent to 12.3 percent.

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And in July, the White House claimed in a report that the “War on Poverty is essentially over and a success,” all while pushing for more work requirements for safety-net programs such as food stamps.

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Almost 3 in 10 black children were poor in 2017, as well as about 1 in 4 Latino kids. That’s compared with about 1 in 9 white children, Golden noted. Such “stark disparities” in poverty rates by race “have consequences for kids’ whole lives,” she added.

For poverty to stagnate despite employment rising overall is attributed in part to workers continuing to get low wages. More than two-thirds of children in poverty live with a working adult, Golden said.

“It’s not about not working,” Golden said. “But low wages, jobs that don’t offer enough hours, jobs that are transient ― it’s what’s going wrong at the low end of the labor market.”