Transcript
REBECCA BLANK: As Ron said in previewing what came out in the report this morning, there is not major news there. In fact, there rarely is major news in the year-over-year poverty numbers. These numbers tend to move relatively slowly and when they move a lot it's big news; but this year like most years, they did not move a lot. Generally the news is good. They came down for almost every group. But for many groups, that change was not terribly significant. So they are moving in the right direction, but they are not moving fast.
So the question is if you are going to put together an article on what is happening in poverty, what do you write about? I am going to tell you the four headlines that I would pull out of today's press release and choose amongst to write about if I were doing that.
Headline number one, poverty is becoming less responsive to economic growth. The interest may not be in year-over-year changes, but that is exactly why the news started looking at trends in poverty. . . .The bottom line here is that the economic expansions we have been having have trickled down less well to use Ronald Reagan's phrases. They are not as equalizing as the 1960s expansion when incomes and earnings among the bottom end of the population went up just as fast and in some years faster than at the top end of the income distribution. There are many, many complex stories as to why that is happening which I will not get into here, but we could go into questions and answers if people are interested. So, headline number one, poverty is simply less responsive to the macroeconomy.
Headline number two. Ron showed you the numbers in child poverty which remain stubbornly high: about one-third of black children are poor, about 10 percent of white children are poor, about 27 percent of Hispanic children are poor. The numbers have fallen a little this year. They are high and they are not falling very fast. What's the headline? The headline is elderly poverty is actually at an all-time low. If you look at poverty among people 65 and over, we are at the lowest that has ever been recorded since we started recording poverty statistics in 1959, at 9.4 percent. . . .
Headline number three, most Americans faced declining earnings last year, and that is actually also quite stunning. Look at what happened to GDP. Look at what happened to unemployment. GDP was up, unemployment was down, and earnings actually declined at the median and they declined even faster for some groups below the median. On the other hand, incomes are up at the median, and the question is how can earnings decline and incomes be up? The answer is it is all a story about labor force participation. Americans are not earning any more to keep their incomes up, they are working harder. They are working more hours and more people in the family are working. You ask me why Americans are not necessarily feeling better off? The answer is quite clear that they are not better off when they look at their own earnings packet, they are simply working harder to either stay at the same level or to get ahead.
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