Poor States of America

You can hardly envy Barack Obama. Only a year until presidential elections, and bad news for the President has been appearing successively. No matter which Republican challenges Barack Obama in fall of 2012, it is easy to predict without any substantial risk of being mistaken that the economy will be one of the most important and vital issues in the election.

Life is full of paradoxes. One of the more surprising ones is that a majority of poor people live in the richest country on the planet. According to the United States Census Bureau, which has been monitoring the poverty situation in the country since 1959, 46.2 billion poor people lived in the U.S. in 2010. Along with the 14 billion unemployed, these figures paint an extremely unpleasant and distressing picture of American life for the current administration. There is considerable anxiety among analysts that the unemployment rate will remain unusually high for some years to come (it has been over 9 percent for three years already). This means that further growth in poverty and decrease in income await America in the foreseeable future.

In the U.S., the poor are considered to be families of four whose annual income does not exceed $22,314. Single Americans whose incomes are less than $11,139 also fall into this category.

For half a century, there were not as many Americans living below the poverty line as there are today. Last year, for the fourth year in a row, the number of poor rose by 2.6 billion, or 15.1 percent, compared to 2009. This climb was slightly less steep in 2009’s 14.3 percent.

“Not only have we experienced severe deterioration in recent years,” Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said to the Washington Post. “But we are staring high unemployment in the face for years to come.”

The data on poverty differs greatly locally. The poorest state in America is Mississippi, where 22.7 percent of the population are poor. New Hampshire is at the opposite pole with 6.6 percent of its population being poor. In the District of Columbia, one in five Americans are poor, whereas in Maryland and Virginia, only one in eleven are poor.

As usual, the growth of poverty affects children heavily. The child poverty rate last year – 22 percent – was at its highest level since 1993.

As always, the data differs considerably depending on skin color. The poverty rate among black children was approximately 40 percent. More than a third of Hispanic children lived in poverty. White children fare much better: just over 12 percent of them are poor.

By the way, the situation is identical among adults: The increase in poverty rates among Hispanic and black Americans in 2010 was 26.6 percent (25.3 percent in 2009) and 27.4 percent (25.8 percent in 2009), respectively, which is twice as high as the national average.

One in ten white Americans is poor (9.9 percent). The increase in poverty rate among them is low: 0.5 percent. The poverty situation within another large group in American society, immigrants from Asia, was rather bearable in 2010; the rate was 12.1 percent. The percentage of the poor among Asians remained at the same level as last year.

Women comprise 17 of the 46 million poor Americans. In 2010, 7.5 million of these women lived in extreme poverty with incomes of less than half the federal poverty rate.

The annual report by the United States Census Bureau contains a lot of interesting and surprising information. For instance, one in six citizens (16.3 percent) of the richest country in the world, or 49.9 million people, did not have health insurance last year. However, this figure changed slightly – by 0.2 percent – compared to 2009.

Inequality, which has become the distinctive feature of the modern American economy, has grown in recent years.

The poverty rate has turned out to be highest since 1993; incomes of the average American household fell by 2.3 percent to $49,445 per year. Nowadays, the average household in the U.S earns less in inflation-adjusted dollars than in 1997.

Compared to its peak in 1999, the average American household incomes have dropped by 7.1 percent. As usual, the poor suffer the most: The annual income of the poorest 10 percent of families plunged by 12.1 percent compared to 1999, whereas the income of richest 10 percent of families declined only by 1.5 percent.

The only group in American society whose incomes have not fallen but grown significantly is the richest 5 percent of American families. Last year, they earned 42 percent more than 12 years ago.