How could the richest and strongest country in the world — whose currency is the global reserve, and which controls the major financial institutions — have people suffering from poverty? Shocking as it may be, it is absolutely true.
Poverty has been on the rise in the United States, and the global financial crisis of 2008 exacerbated the problem greatly. Unfortunately, the issue has remained on the margins of political discourse and has not been properly addressed by either of the two parties. You can see the headline figure in this overview of the U.S. poverty rate.
01Defining the threshold
The definition of "poor" differs from country to country, so many people considered poor in the United States would not be counted as poor in most other nations. In many ways poverty is a subjective measure — each nation draws its own line in terms of average daily or monthly income.
The US Census Bureau sets the poverty threshold every year, adjusting the previous year's level for inflation according to the consumer price index. In 2017, the government's threshold was $12,140 for a family of one and $25,100 for a family of four — which comes to around $17 a day per person.
The full 2017 threshold by household size:
People earning below these levels are considered poor. It bears repeating that the definition of poverty is highly relative and varies with each nation's financial condition: in most developing countries the threshold would be around $2 a day, and in underdeveloped countries closer to $1 a day.
Last year, government statistics recorded 12.3% of the U.S. population as being "in poverty," while under 3% were actually "living in poverty." The difference matters: the former are people who, with the help of social welfare benefits, are able to live in a way that keeps them out of poverty — while the latter are unable to attain those benefits at all.
02Other key statistics
Among the states, New Mexico has the highest share of poor population at 21.8%, while New Hampshire has the lowest at 6.6% — but those figures rely on the old-fashioned official method. Under the newer, more rigorous definition used by the Census Bureau, California comes top with 20.6%. The older system of measurement is around fifty years old; the more rigorous method came into being only recently.
The trouble with calculating poverty nationwide is that each state has a different cost of living, so poverty really needs to be assessed individually in each of them. When the overall figures are broken down by identity, some striking patterns emerge.
- Gender: 13.8% of males lived in poverty, compared with 16.3% of females.
- Family type: 5.1% of married couples were in poverty, versus 13.1% of single-parent families — rising to 26.6% for single-parent families where the mother is the only parent.
- Age: 21.2% of children lived in poverty, and 9.3% of seniors — though the senior figure climbs to 14.5% once the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which accounts for the cost of healthcare, is applied.
03Poverty by racial identity
Racial identity still plays a very important role in the socio-political landscape of the USA, which is why poverty also needs to be measured at a racial level. When the figures are broken down this way, the picture that emerges is telling.
The difficulties faced by minorities like Native Americans and African-Americans show that there is still a great deal to be done on the front of social justice and equality. The relative prosperity of Asians is largely a result of the fact that most arrive in the country as highly-qualified professionals rather than as poor asylum seekers, and so they fare better.
04The raw numbers
Moving away from percentages, the raw counts are sobering. There were 40.6 million people living in poverty in the United States in 2016. Of these, 15.3 million were children — and 2.5 million of those children were experiencing homelessness.
While the total number of people suffering from poverty stands at 40.6 million, 18.5 million of them are living in deep poverty — meaning earnings of less than 50% of the poverty threshold. Even the UN has stepped into the discussion, with its special rapporteur on extreme poverty, Philip Alston, pointing out in a report that around five million people in the country live in "third world conditions."
This is embarrassing, to say the least, for the world's biggest superpower.