Poverty rate rises to 16.9% in South

41% of U.S.’ poor live in region

— The nation’s economic woes continued to hit the South hard in 2010 as the number of poor in the region rose and the median household income fell, census numbers released Tuesday show.

The number of poor in the South grew by about 1.5 million between 2009 and 2010, pushing the region’s poverty rate to 16.9 percent, the highest of the four regions defined by the Census Bureau.

The South also once again recorded the lowest median household income of all regions and the highest rate of people without health insurance.

“The two recessions of the last decade really hit us hard, particularly the second one - the so-called Great Recession,” said Ferrel Guillory, a senior fellow at the nonprofit research firm MDC in Durham, N.C., and co-author of the policy and economic report, “The State of the South.”

“We in the South lost a lot of our traditional industry, and it’s not coming back. The uptick in poverty is directly related to the downward spiral of employment.”

In the South, 19.1 million people were living in poverty in 2010, up from 17.6 million in 2009.

The region’s poor made up more than 41 percent of the nation’s residents living in poverty last year.

In 2010, the average poverty threshold for a family of four was $22,314, a level that is recalculated annually.

Nationally, the poverty rate climbed to 15.1 percent, or 46.2 million - nearly 1 in 6 people - from 14.3 percent in 2009.

Census officials cited the significant growth in the number of those who didn’t work a single week in 2010 as a major factor in the national increase.

The number of people 16 and older who didn’t work at least a week rose to 86.8 million in 2010, said Trudi Renwick, chief of the Census Bureau’s poverty statistics branch. A year earlier, the number was 83.3 million, Renwick told reporters in a teleconference.

Renwick and others on Tuesday presented the Census Bureau’s annual report that offers a snapshot of the economic well-being of U.S. households for 2010, when joblessness hovered above 9 percent for a second year.

The report - Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2010 - is based on responses to the bureau’s annual social and economic supplement to the Current Population Survey.

The report includes multiyear average estimates forstates, but the Census Bureau cautions against using them because the survey’s margins of error for several states, including Arkansas, are high. More reliable state estimates will be released next week when the bureau presents the results of the annual American Community Survey.

The main findings of the report show that the U.S. poverty rate from 2007-10 has risen faster than for any three-year period since the early 1980s, when a crippling energy crisis amid government cutbacks contributed to inflation, spiraling interest rates and unemployment.

The number of the nation’s residents now living in poverty is the largest on record dating back to when the census began tracking poverty in 1959. Based on percentages, it tied the poverty level in 1993 and was the highest since 1983.

Bruce Meyer, a public policy professor at the University of Chicago, told The Associated Press that the worst may be yet to come, citing in part continued rising demand for food stamps this year as well as “staggeringly high” numbers of those unemployed for more than 26 weeks.

He noted that more than 6 million people now represent the so-called long-term unemployed, who are more likely to fall into poverty. They account for more than 2 out of 5 currently out of work.

The numbers also give a more detailed snapshot of the impact of the recession on the four regions of the country, with estimates again showing a dire economic situation for Southerners.

Median household income in the South fell 1.9 percent from $46,368 in 2009 to $45,492 in 2010, the lowest of all regions.

The number was about$4,000 below the national median household income, which fell 2.3 percent from $50,599 in 2009 to $49,445, census estimates show. Income is calculated in 2010 dollars.

The numbers were even worse when compared with 2007, the year before the past recession.

Between 2007 and 2010, median household income declined in all regions, with the largest decline of 8.4 percent occurring in the Midwest. The West saw the secondlargest decline of 6.7 percent, followed by the South with a 6.3 percent decrease. The South again posted the lowest household income of the four regions.

Nationally, income fell 6.4 percent over the recession years from $52,823 to $49,445.

Declining income and high unemployment were big contributors to the nation’s number of uninsured, which rose to 49.9 million, Guillory said.

The share of Americanswithout health insurance in 2010 was 16.3 percent, about the same rate as the previous year. The numbers showed declines in those covered by employer-provided health insurance, which Guillory said is heavily affected by job losses.

“Much of our health insurance system in this country is tied to employment ... when people aren’t working, it’s hard to get insurance,” he said

The South again had the largest number of uninsured residents, about 21.7 million, as well as the highest rate of uninsured, 19.1 percent. However, those numbers - like the national rate - weren’t significantly different from the 2009 figures, which economists said was unexpected.

“I was really expecting the numbers to be worse,” said Dr. Mick Tilford, a health economist at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock.

Tilford said the leveling off was likely the result of smallerincreases in the price of health insurance over the recession years and a provision in the nation’s health-care overhaul that was passed by Congress last year that allowed young adults age 26 and younger to be covered under their parents’ health insurance.

“There’s no doubt the extension had an impact,” said Tilford, who is also a professor of health policy and management at UAMS. “With the younger folks being able to stay on their parents’ health insurance longer with the new rules, there’s a chance these numbers would have been worse had these new rules not gone into effect.”

Nationwide, the uninsured rate for those age 18-24 declined from 29.3 percent to 27.2 percent - the largest decrease in uninsured of all age groups.

Overall, governmentprovided health insurance increased, but Tilford said that’s likely not the result ofthe national health-care overhaul because many of the law’s provisions don’t take effect until 2014.

Instead, he said, it’s the impact of retiring baby boomers.

“We’ll be seeing more and more folks going into Medicare over time,” he said, citing figures that show that about 10,000 baby boomers will turn 65 each day during the next 19 years.

The growing elderly population will be felt across all regions, but national numbers showing the economic health of members of minority groups will play more of a role in the coming years in the South, where younger populations are becoming more and more racially diverse, Guillory said.

In 2010, blacks and Hispanics had higher rates of no health insurance, poverty and lower median household incomes than whites, census numbers show.

“The future of the South is going to be increasingly dependent on the health and well-being of a more diverse population - our most vulnerable population in terms of health insurance, in terms of poverty, in terms of educational attainment,” he said. “This doesn’t bode well for the future of the South if too many of our young black and Latinos, who are going to be part of the core of our work force in 20 years, are in poverty.”

And, Tilford said, the declining income numbers don’t bode well for public health ingeneral in the South.

“All the indicators are correlated with income. The poorer the state, the poorer the region, the more likely you are to have teen pregnancy, obesity and poorer health,” he said.

Information for this article was contributed by Hope Yen of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 09/14/2011

Upcoming Events