The Poor Are Being Left Behind In This Economy

The U.S. economy is doing pretty well right now -- if you are rich. But the working and middle classes are still struggling just to maintain their buying power against inflation. And one group, the poor, have been left behind in the economy Trump brags about. Although still the richest nation in the world, the U.S. poverty rate remains one of the highest in the developed world.

The U.S. Census Bureau recently released statistics on poverty in this country. While poverty was beginning to get better in the last few years of the Obama administration, that has slowed dramatically under the policies of Trump and the GOP Congress -- and they want now to cut programs that are trying to keep poverty from rising again.

Here is some of how The New York Times reports on the Census Bureaus newest poverty report:

In July, President Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers declared that the country’s five-decade war on poverty was largely over and called it a success.

On Wednesday, the Census Bureau released its 2017 annual report on the poor that offered a stark counterpoint, suggesting that the national recovery has bypassed many of the 40 million to 45 million Americans estimated to be living below the federal poverty level.

While median household income rose 1.8 percent last year, the national poverty rate remained stubbornly high at 12.3 percent. That was just a slight decrease from the previous year’s level of 12.7 percent, according to the federal government’s most comprehensive annual gauge of economic hardship.

The supplemental poverty measure for 2017, widely regarded by economists as more accurate, was even higher, 13.9 percent in 2017, essentially unchanged from the year before. That is an improvement from the recent high of 16 percent recorded in 2013. But economists and advocates for poor people say the relatively modest gains over the last few years are fragile, endangered by the Trump administration’s policies and vulnerable to a long-overdue economic downturn.

“If this is the best we can do, it isn’t good,” said Timothy Smeeding, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies poverty and economic mobility.

“Things really tapered off this year, after a serious drop in previous years,” he said. “In terms of the boom, the party has lasted a long time, a lot longer than we thought, but not everybody is getting invited — people who are working several jobs, taking jobs without benefits, kids who are growing up in poverty. The fruits of the recovery are not being spread around evenly.”

The report comes as the Trump administration seeks to curtail safety net programs, in part by playing down the severity of poverty in the country. . . .

Trump’s economic team, led by Kevin Hassett, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, has questioned both of the Census Bureau’s poverty calculations. The real poverty rate is much lower, the team has argued, citing a 2017 paper by two conservative economists that used a statistical analysis based on spending patterns by the poor that pegged the rate at closer to 3 percent. . . .

The Census Bureau’s official poverty measure, calculated at 12.3 percent last year, is widely viewed as an outdated formula.

Most economists consider the poverty number published concurrently in the supplemental report, which is 1.6 percentage points higher, to be a more precise measure because it factors in the cost of expenses like housing, child care and transportation, while estimating the positive effect of government benefits like Social Security, Medicaid and the earned-income tax credit.

NOTE -- At 12.3%, there are about 40 million people living in poverty. At the more precise rate of  13.9%, that rises to about 45 million people. Neither is an acceptable level of poverty for a country as rich as the United States.