Today the U.S. Census Bureau will release a new set of income, poverty and health insurance data based on the American Community Survey. This survey is the one recommended for state-level analysis, and we will be analyzing its data carefully for what it tells us about the impact of the recession on Oklahoma households.

In the meantime, thanks to a long plane ride and my recurring tendency to pack novels in the wrong bag, I had a chance last week to look more closely at the Census Bureau’s other report on income, poverty and health insurance, the Current Population Survey, released two weeks ago (I can’t help but think of the show Newhart: “This is my Census Bureau survey Darryl, and this is my other Census Bureau survey Darryl”). The report included findings on work experience and earnings over the past year, along with historical comparisons. Despite having followed the path of the Great Recession closely over the past two years, I was astonished to read the following:

Between 2007 and 2009, the number of males working full-time year-round with earnings decreased by 6.9 million; the number of females working full-time year-round with earning decreased by 2.4 million. Read the rest of this entry »

It is widely known that minorities in the United States earn considerably less than Whites – according to the most recent Census Bureau data, the median income for a White household in 2008 was 34.5 percent greater than for a Black household and 28 percent higher than for a Hispanic household. Poverty rates for Blacks and Hispanics are also more than double than for Whites.

What is less frequently noted is that the racial wealth gap in America is even greater than the income gap. The 2009-10 Assets and Opportunity Scorecard that was recently released by CFED reports that for the nation as a whole,  the median White household possesses net worth (the sum of all assets less liabilities) six times greater than the median minority household: $122,505 compared to $20,132. In Oklahoma, the racial wealth gap was found to be even larger: the median white household enjoys net worth of $66,468 compared to just $6,620 for the median minority household, a gap of  10:1. Additionally, the report found that 37.2 percent of minority households nationally and 43.7 percent in Oklahoma live in “asset poverty”, meaning that they lacked sufficient net worth to subsist at the poverty level for three months in the absence of income. (By comparison, 16.4 percent of White households nationally and 15.9  in Oklahoma were determined to be “asset poor”). Read the rest of this entry »