Next week, the U.S. Census Bureau will release its annual report on poverty in the United States. The report will tell us how many Americans had income in 2009 below the federal poverty level, which is $18,310 for a family of three. It is widely expected that the 2009 numbers, reflecting the worst of the Great Recession, will show historic increases in the number of  Americans falling below the poverty line.

As it has since the 1960′s, the 2010 Census Bureau numbers will be based on a measure that looks strictly at a household’s cash income and that is pegged to the cost of a 1950s basic food diet, adjusted for inflation.  The measure has long been criticized as inadequate: among other limitations, it fails to reflect the real costs families face in meeting basic needs; it fails to adjust for regional differences in the cost of living; and it excludes non-cash income and benefits received by low-income families. Over the years, a number of researchers and policy groups have developed alternate measures of poverty and economic security, including the Self-Sufficiency Standards that were developed for Oklahoma and other states.  Back in 1995, the National Academy of Science issued a report called Measuring Poverty that provided recommendations for modernizing the poverty measure. The NAS recommendations were adopted by Mayor Bloomberg in New York, among others, as a basis for formulating anti-poverty policies. but were ignored, for various reasons, by the Clinton and Bush administrations. Read the rest of this entry »

Last month, the Bureau of Economic Analysis released its preliminary report on state per capital personal income for 2009. Personal income is the income received by all persons from all sources, and is the most commonly used measure of state economic growth.

Not surprisingly, the report showed that 2009 was a rough year. Across the nation, state personal income declined by an average of 2.6 percent. As we discuss in the April edition of Numbers You Need, our monthly bulletin of key economic and budget data, in Oklahoma, per capital personal income (PCPI) fell by 1.9 percent, from $35,969 in 2008 to $35,268 in 2009. This drop ranked Oklahoma 22nd among the states in percent change from 2008 to 2009. West Virginia saw the strongest growth in 2009 and was one of only three states, along with Maine and Maryland, that registered positive growth. Wyoming saw the steepest decline, -5.9 percent, with Nevada, South Dakota, Idaho and Arizona rounding out the bottom five. 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 »