Annual Poverty Rate Expected to Climb
The Census Bureau on Wednesday will release annual figures on the U.S. poverty rate, and analysts and politicians will watch closely to see if the rate continues its climb.
Austin Nichols, an analyst with the Urban Institute, expects a “modest uptick” when the “2011 Census Data on Poverty, Health Insurance Coverage and Income” report is released at 10 a.m. Eastern time.
“The real issue is why the poverty isn’t higher,” Nichols said. “When an unemployment duration is very long and widespread, most people’s expectation is that poverty should be even higher.”
The impact on blacks and Hispanics, as well as children, will continue to be most significant.
Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP's Washington Bureau and senior vice president for advocacy and policy, points to unemployment correlating closely with poverty, which disproportionately affects blacks and Latinos.
“What we’ll see is a settling,” Shelton said. “We still see we’ve lost some jobs, but the rate of loss hasn’t been as bad.”
In his analysis of the census data released last year, Nichols wrote, “History shows that unemployment and poverty rates keep rising after a recession ends.” A year later, he said, “Until the job numbers improve, we’re going to be seeing a lot of poverty.”
How has the poverty rate changed over time? We charted the percentage of all U.S. families living below the poverty rate, as tracked by the Census Bureau, between 1975 and 2010. Take a look at the interactive graph below.
