Poverty in the United States
In the United States, poverty has both social and political implications. Based on poverty measures used by the Census Bureau, America had 37 million people defined as living in poverty in 2023; this is 11 percent of the population. Some of the many causes include income, inequality, inflation, unemployment, debt traps and poor education. The majority of adults living in poverty are employed and have at least a high school education. Although the US is a relatively wealthy country by international standards, it has a persistently high poverty rate compared to other developed countries due in part to a less generous welfare system.
Efforts to alleviate poverty include New Deal-era legislation during the Great Depression, to the national war on poverty in the 1960s and poverty alleviation efforts during the 2008 Great Recession. The federal government has two departments which measure poverty. Under the Department of Commerce, the Census Bureau has been reporting the Official Poverty Measure since the 1960s, while the Department of Health and Human Services defines income levels for which people are eligible for governmental anti-poverty assistance. The OPM includes cash assistance from programs like Supplemental Security Income and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families as part of someone's income when reporting on how many people are in poverty. Since 2011 the Census Bureau has also been reporting a newer Supplemental Poverty Measure, which includes non-cash anti-poverty government assistance like Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid, and also accounts for regional differences in the cost of living. The SPM is considered a more comprehensive estimate of poverty.
For 2021, the percentage of Americans in poverty per the SPM was 7.8%, and per the OPM was 11.6%. By the OPM, the poverty threshold for 2021 for a single person was $13,800, and for a family of four was $27,700. In 2020, the World Bank reported that 0.25% of Americans lived below the international definition of extreme poverty, which is living on less than $2.15 per day in 2017 Purchasing Power Parity dollars. The SPM increased by 4.6% in 2022 to 12.4%, due to the ending of pandemic stimulus payments and tax credits, with around 15.3 million Americans falling into poverty over this time period according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
The 2020 assessment by the U.S. Census Bureau showed the percentage of Americans living in poverty for 2019 had fallen to some of the lowest levels ever recorded due to the record-long period of economic growth. However, between May and October 2020, some eight million people were put into poverty due to the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ending of funds from the CARES Act.
History
Progressive era 1890s-1920s
Catalyzed by Henry George's 1873 book Progress and Poverty, public interest in how poverty could arise even in a time of economic progress arose in the 19th century with the rise of the Progressive movement. The Progressive American social survey began with the publication of Hull House Maps and Papers in 1895. This study included essays and maps collected by Florence Kelley and her colleagues working at Hull House and staff of the United States Bureau of Labor. It focused on studying the conditions of the slums in Chicago, including four maps color-coded by nationality and income level, which were based on Charles Booth's earlier pioneering work, Life and Labour of the People in London.Another social reformer, Jacob Riis, documented the living conditions of New York tenements and slums in his 1890 work How the Other Half Lives.
Great Depression
A group especially vulnerable to poverty consisted of poor sharecroppers and tenant farmers in the South. These farmers consisted of around a fourth of the South's population, and over a third of these people were African Americans. Historian James T. Patterson refers to these people as the "old poverty," as opposed to the "new poverty" that emerged after the onset of the Great Depression.During the Depression, the government did not provide any unemployment insurance, so people who lost jobs easily became impoverished. People who lost their jobs or homes lived in shantytowns or Hoovervilles. Many New Deal programs were designed to increase employment and reduce poverty. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration specifically focused on creating jobs for alleviating poverty. Jobs were more expensive than direct cash payments, but were psychologically more beneficial to the unemployed, who wanted any sort of job for morale. Other New Deal initiatives that aimed at job creation and wellbeing included the Civilian Conservation Corps and Public Works Administration. Additionally, the institution of Social Security was one of the largest factors that helped to reduce poverty.
War on poverty
A number of factors helped start the national war on poverty in the 1960s. In 1962, Michael Harrington's book The Other America helped increase public debate and awareness of the poverty issue. The war on poverty embraced expanding the federal government's roles in education and health care as poverty reduction strategies, and many of its programs were administered by the newly established Office of Economic Opportunity. The war on poverty coincided with more methodological and precise statistical versions of studying poverty; the "official" U.S. statistical measure of poverty was only adopted in 1969.21st century
In the 21st century, the Great Recession helped to raise the poverty levels again., the number of people who were in poverty was approaching 1960s levels that led to the national war on poverty. The 2010 census data shows that half the population qualifies as poor or low income, with one in five millennials living in poverty. Academic contributors to The Routledge Handbook of Poverty in the United States postulate that new and extreme forms of poverty have emerged in the U.S. as a result of neoliberal structural adjustment policies and globalization, which have rendered economically marginalized communities as destitute "surplus populations" in need of control and punishment.Many international bodies have emphasized the issues of poverty that the United States faces. A 2013 UNICEF report ranked the U.S. as having the second-highest relative child poverty rates in the developed world., the IMF warned the United States that its high poverty rate needs to be tackled urgently by raising the minimum wage and offering paid maternity leave to women to encourage them to enter the labor force. In December 2017, the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, undertook a two-week investigation on the effects of systemic poverty in the United States, and sharply condemned "private wealth and public squalor," declaring the state of Alabama to have the "worst poverty in the developed world." Alston's report was issued in May 2018 and highlights that 40 million people live in poverty and over five million live "in 'Third World' conditions."
According to a 2020 assessment by the U.S. Census Bureau, the percentage of Americans living in poverty for 2019 had fallen to some of lowest levels ever recorded due to the record-long economic growth period and stood at 11.1%. However, between May and October 2020, the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the exhaustion of the funding provided by the CARES Act, dragged some eight million people into poverty.
According to OECD, nearly 23 percent of American workers work in low-wage jobs, compared with 17 percent in Britain, 11 percent in Japan and 5 percent in Italy. In January 2021, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 11.6 percent of the US population, or 37.9 million people, were living in poverty. In his 2023 book Poverty, by America, sociologist Matthew Desmond writes that the poverty rate in the United States has not improved in half a century, with 11% of the population living in poverty in 2019, compared to 12% in 1970.
Social scientist Mark Robert Rank writes in 2023 that the last four decades has seen a retrenchment of the social safety net, with a reduction in eligibility and amount of benefits transferred. This, along with the failure of the US to provide universal child care, medical insurance and other social benefits as done in peer countries, has resulted in the US having much higher poverty rates by comparison.
The official poverty rate in the United States decreased to 10.6 percent in 2024. This figure is a reduction from 11.1 percent in 2023. In 2024, there were 35.9 million individuals living in poverty.
Measuring poverty
There are several measures used by the U.S. federal government to measure poverty. The Census Bureau issues the poverty thresholds, which are generally used for statistical purposes—for example, to estimate the number of people in poverty nationwide each year and classify them by type of residence, race, and other social, economic, and demographic characteristics. The Department of Health and Human Services issues the poverty guidelines for administrative purposes—for instance, to determine whether a person or family is eligible for assistance through various federal programs. Both the poverty thresholds and poverty guidelines are updated yearly. More recently, the Census Bureau has begun using the Supplemental Poverty Measure as an additional statistic to measure poverty and supplement the existing measures.Poverty income thresholds
The poverty income thresholds originate from work done by Mollie Orshansky, an American economist working for the Social Security Administration. Orshansky introduced the poverty thresholds in a 1963 Social Security Bulletin article, "Children of the Poor."Orshansky based her thresholds on work she had done with the economy food plan while at the USDA. According to the USDA's 1955 Household Food Consumption Survey, families of three or more people spent one-third of their after-tax income on food. For these families, poverty thresholds were set at three times the cost of the economy food plan. Different procedures were used for calculating poverty thresholds for two-person households and persons living alone.
Her work appeared at an opportune moment, as President Johnson declared the war on poverty just six months later—and Orshansky's work offered a numerical way to measure progress in this effort. The newly formed Office of Economic Opportunity adopted the Orshansky poverty thresholds for statistical, planning, and budgetary purposes in May 1965. Officials at the OEO were enthusiastic; as research director Joseph Kershaw remarked, "Mollie Orshansky says that when you have more people in the family, you need more money. Isn't that sensible?"
Officials at the Social Security Administration began to plan on how to adjust poverty thresholds for changes in the standard of living. The Bureau of the Budget resisted these changes, but formed an interagency committee that, in 1969, decided that poverty thresholds would be adjusted for inflation by being tied to the Consumer Price Index, rather than changes in the standard of living. In August 1969, the Bureau of the Budget designated these revised thresholds as the federal government's official definition of poverty.
Apart from minor changes in 1981 that changed the number of thresholds from 124 to 48, poverty thresholds have remained static for the past fifty years despite criticism that the thresholds may not be completely accurate. Although the poverty thresholds assumes that the average household of three spends one-third of its budget on food, more recent surveys have shown that that number has decreased to one-fifth in the 1980s and one-sixth by the 1990s. If the poverty thresholds were recalculated based on the share of household budgets taken by food costs as of 2008, the economy food budget multiplier would have been 7.8 rather than 3, greatly increasing the thresholds.