Census Bureau to release new poverty numbers

The official poverty rate fell from 14.8 percent in 2014 to 13.4 percent last year, the largest one-year drop since 1968.

The White House highlighted a report Tuesday showing the biggest decline in the US poverty rate since 1968.

Analysts cautioned against reading too much into this still-high supplemental poverty rate because it reflects the withdrawal of generous benefits put in place during and immediately after the recession to cushion families. States that opted not to expand Medicaid under the 2010 health law generally showed greater rates of people lacking health insurance, with Texas having the highest uninsured rate at 17.1%.

Household incomes across the United States rose sharply in 2015, after years of stagnation following the 2008 economic crisis, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday. Income inequality eased, with income growing faster for middle class than the rich, and lower-income households improving even more. That’s the first meaningful increase since 2007 and the biggest bounce on record, according to definitive numbers released Tuesday by the Census Bureau. Median earnings for a non-hispanic white family, meanwhile, leaped to $63,000 past year and are back at or above the pre-recession level.

But the median household saw incomes stagnate and lost ground to inflation throughout the recession and gradual recovery. Median incomes are still lower today than in 2007.

Meanwhile, the poverty rate fell 13.5 per cent – the largest percentage point in more than a decade.

In fact, medical bills are a major reason that America’s poverty rate, although lower than it was previous year, remains higher than it is in other developed nations. Last year, 1.4 million more men and about 1 million more women were working full time year-round than in 2014, the census found.

Nebraska also saw the percentage of people without health insurance fall to 8.2 percent in 2015, down from 9.7 percent in 2014. More full-time workers means more steady paychecks and greater pressure for employers to raise wages. The poverty rate for children under age 18 dropped from 21.1 percent to 19.7 percent, which is a 1.4 percent drop. However, income gains in the South were just 2.9 percent, the weakest of any of the four regions in the Census Bureau’s report. Nonmetropolitan population in 2015 was about 44 million, a decline of about 11 percent from the 2014 rural population estimate of about 50 million, the report said. And many households that once had middle-class incomes have not recovered since losing work in manufacturing and other higher-paying jobs, with some of them dropping out of the labour force and becoming impoverished.