Following some off-the-cuff comments from Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, stories about the population of Americans living under the poverty limit as well as those living in more extreme measures of poverty have become more frequent in the past few weeks.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2010 Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States report there were 46.2 million Americans living below the poverty level, a rate of 15.1% of the population.  This rate was the highest it had been in the United States since 1983.  Furthermore, almost half of the population in poverty (44.3%) were living in severe poverty, earning less than half of the poverty threshold.  This group constituted approximately one of every fifteen (6.7%) Americans.  The average household living in poverty would have to earn more than an additional $9,000 a year just to meet the poverty threshold.

These numbers are based off of the official thresholds for poverty determined by the Census Bureau, which have been the subject of criticism for numerous reasons including the failure to recognize geographic differences in living expenses and additional income from government benefits.  The Supplemental Poverty Measure from the Census Bureau, detailed here in an earlier blog posting, adjusts the poverty threshold to account for some of these factors.  Under this alternative measure, the rate of those in poverty increases slightly to 16.0% in 2010 while the rate of those in severe poverty decreases to 5.4%.

The demographic breakdown of the impoverished population reveals some groups that experience a disproportionate burden of poverty.  Although youth under the age of 18 represent about a quarter of the entire population (24.4%), they account for 35.5% of people in poverty and 36.0% of people in severe poverty. The risk of poverty was more than three times higher in black and Hispanic households than in non-Hispanic white households but the  majority of the population in poverty (64.9%) and the population of children in poverty (53.6%) is non-Hispanic white.  Single parent households were also much more likely to experience poverty, especially single female headed households where fully two of every five (40.7%) households with children were impoverished.

Since the late 1950’s, poverty rates have come down substantially from a high of 22.4% of the population in 1959.  In the year 2000, the poverty rate reached the lowest it had been (11.3%) since the Census Bureau began keeping records. Since that time, however, the poverty rate has increased eight out of ten years and has jumped from 12.3% in 2006 (the last full year before the recession) to 15.1 today.