Poverty In America By Year

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President Lyndon Johnson’s visit to Tom Fletcher’s home in Kentucky was part of his tour of poverty stricken areas in the U.S. (Photo by Walter Bennett/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images).

Fifty years ago, President Lyndon Johnson used his first State of the Union address to urge “all-out war on human poverty and unemployment in these United States.” The War on Poverty, as the set of social programs enacted in 1964-1965 came to  be called, was arguably the most ambitious domestic policy initiative since the Great Depression. But for decades, politicians and social scientists have argued about whether Johnson’s antipoverty programs have lifted people out of destitution, trapped them in cycles of dependency, or both.

Years Of Us Poverty: 1960 To 2010

Critics note that the official poverty rate, as calculated by the Census Bureau, has fallen only modestly, from 19% in 1964 to 15% in 2012 (the most recent year available). But other analysts, citing shortcomings in the official poverty measure, focus on a supplemental measure (also produced by the Census Bureau) to argue that more progress has been made. A team of researchers from Columbia University, for example, calculated an “anchored” supplemental measure — essentially the 2012 measure carried back through time and adjusted for historical inflation — and found that it fell from about 26% in 1967 to 16% in 2012.

What’s inarguable, though, is that the demographics of America’s poor have shifted over the decades. Here’s a look at what has, and hasn’t, changed, based on the official measure. (Note: The reference years vary depending on data availability.) 

Today, most poor Americans are in their prime working years: In 2012, 57% of poor Americans were ages 18 to 64, versus 41.7% in 1959.

Transitions Into And Out Of Poverty In The United States

Far fewer elderly are poor: In 1966, 28.5% of Americans ages 65 and over were poor; by 2012 just 9.1% were. There were 1.2 million fewer elderly poor in 2012 than in 1966, despite the doubling of the total elderly population. Researchers generally credit this steep drop to Social Security, particularly the expansion and inflation-indexing of benefits during the 1970s.

But childhood poverty persists: Poverty among children younger than 18 began dropping even before the War on Poverty. From 27.3% in 1959, childhood poverty fell to 23% in 1964 and to 14% by 1969. Since then, however, the childhood poverty rate has risen, fallen and, since the 2007-08 financial crisis, risen again.

Today’s poor families are structured differently: In 1973, the first year for which data are available, more than half (51.4%) of poor families were headed by a married couple; 45.4% were headed by women. In 2012, just over half (50.3%) of poor families were female-headed, while 38.9% were headed by married couples.

Weekly Chart: Poverty Inches Up In Latin America

Poverty is more evenly distributed, though still heaviest in the South: In 1969, 45.9% of poor Americans lived in the South, a region that accounted for 31% of the U.S. population at the time. At 17.9%, the South’s poverty rate was far above other regions. In 2012, the South was home to 37.3% of all Americans and 41.1% of the nation’s poor people; though the South’s poverty rate, 16.5%, was the highest among the four Census-designated regions, it was only 3.2 percentage points above the lowest (the Midwest).

Poverty among blacks has fallen sharply: In 1966, two years after Johnson’s speech, four-in-ten (41.8%) of African-Americans were poor; blacks constituted nearly a third (31.1%) of all poor Americans. By 2012, poverty among African-Americans had fallen to 27.2% — still more than double the rate among whites (12.7%, 1.4 percentage points higher than in 1966).

But poverty has risen among Hispanics. Poverty data for Hispanics, who can be of any race, wasn’t collected until 1972. That year, 22.8% lived below the poverty threshold. In 2012, the share of Hispanics in poverty had risen to 25.6%. But the U.S. Hispanic population has quintupled over that time. As a result, more than half of the 22 million-person increase in official poverty between 1972 and 2012 was among Hispanics.

Unemployment Rate Drops But Poverty Rate Rises

About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts.Proportion of Americans living below the poverty line in each county of the fifty states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico according to the 2016–2020 American Community Survey

Poverty has consisttly be prest throughout the United States, along with efforts to alleviate it, from 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 poverty threshold in the United States was at $12, 880 for a single-person household and $26, 246 for a family of four in 2021.

One In Five American Children In Poverty: How Did We Get Here?

As of 2023, 2.75% of the U.S. population earn less than $10 per day, with only 23 countries in the world having a lower perctage.

The U.S. federal governmt uses two measures to measure poverty: the poverty thresholds set by the U.S. Csus Bureau, used for statistical purposes, and the poverty guidelines issued by the Departmt of Health and Human Services, which are used for administrative purposes.

Poverty thresholds, which recognize poverty as a lack of those goods and services which are commonly tak for granted by members of mainstream society,

Why Poverty Persists In America

Consist of income levels. On the other hand, poverty guidelines are simpler guidelines that are used to determine eligibility for federal programs such as Head Start and food stamps.

The 2020 assessmt by the U.S. Csus Bureau showed the perctage of Americans living in poverty for 2019 (before the COVID-19 pandemic) had fall to some of lowest levels ever recorded due to the record-long period of economic growth.

However, betwe May and October 2020, some eight million people were put into poverty due to the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ding of funds from the CARES Act.

A Striking Reminder Of The Link Between Race And Poverty In America

Catalyzed by Hry George's 1873 book Progress and Poverty, public interest in how poverty could arise ev in a time of economic progress arose in the 19th ctury with the rise of the Progressive movemt. 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 Florce 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, documted the living conditions of New York temts and slums in his 1890 work How the Other Half Lives.

List Of U.s. States And Territories By Poverty Rate

A group especially vulnerable to poverty consisted of poor sharecroppers and tant 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.

People who lost their jobs or homes lived in shantytowns or Hoovervilles. Many New Deal programs were designed to increase employmt and reduce poverty. The Federal Emergcy Relief Administration specifically focused on creating jobs for alleviating poverty. Jobs were more expsive than direct cash paymts (called the dole), but were psychologically more beficial to the unemployed, who wanted any sort of job for morale.

Tracking American Poverty

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.

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 awaress of the poverty issue. The War on Poverty embraced expanding the federal governmt'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.

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 adjustmt policies and globalization, which have rdered economically marginalized communities as destitute surplus populations in need of control and punishmt.

U.s. Poverty Has Plunged

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 urgtly by raising the minimum wage and offering paid maternity leave to wom to courage them to ter

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