Poverty: It’s More than a Job Market Story --- Between 2010 and 2013, the unemployment rate fell by 23% in the United States. The poverty rate, we predict, will have fallen by only one percent over the same time period. That is, for a second year in a row, we expect no significant change in either the poverty rate for all persons or for children. Whether or not this prediction is accurate will be revealed on Tuesday, September 16, when the Census Bureau publishes its 2013 Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) to the Current Population Survey. --- Disentangling poverty and unemployment -- Historically, the poverty rate has moved with the unemployment rate. Since 1970, in fact, the official poverty rate has spiked during each recession. Intuitively, this makes sense—if you lose your job, then you lose access to a steady stream of income. When you find a new job—as people are wont to do in the recovery after a recession, your prospects improve. Nevertheless, as shown in Figure 1, despite the sharp decline in unemployment following the Great Recession, the headline poverty rate has remained at or near 15%. --- Poverty in the United States as of 2013 -- Since 2009, the Center on Children and Families at Brookings has predicted the U.S. poverty rate in advance of the release of the official figure. For 2013, our estimates of the poverty rate for all persons and for children are 14.9% and 21.8%, respectively. Neither of these estimates represents a statistically significant change from 2012; the change itself falls within the Census Bureau’s margin of error. -- As evidenced by these rates, poverty remains a harsh reality for many Americans. In real terms, a headline poverty rate of 14.9% translates to 47.0 million people—as many as are living in both New York and Texas combined. The children’s rate translates to 15.7 million children. In other words, as of 2013, about one in three people living in poverty in the United States was a child. - Read More, Brookings Institution, http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/social-mobility-memos/posts/2014/09/12-poverty-rate-stuck