New Half in Ten Report Shares Vision for Reducing Inequality

Yesterday, Half in Ten released its annual report about the state of poverty in America. The Right Choices to Cut Poverty and Restore Shared Prosperity analyzes a broad set of indicators and serves as a needed call to action for the anti-poverty community. In 2011, 15% of all Americans lived beneath the federal poverty level. Women, children, people of color, and people living with disabilities all experienced higher rates than this average. Despite these disparities and the lingering impact of the recession, Half in Ten notes the role public policies and programs have played in mitigating the spread of poverty. Programs such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and SNAP (food stamps) played an instrumental role in supporting both the work efforts and basic needs of people living in or near poverty.

The release of the report was marked by an event at the Center for American Progress, featuring remarks by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and members of a variety of organizations seeking to change the conversation about poverty, including Witnesses to Hunger, the Coalition on Human Needs, and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. Half in Ten Director Melissa Boteach emphasized that the new data is especially critical as Congress debates tax policy and cuts to critical safety net programs. Mayor Villaragoisa echoed her sentiment, quoting Lyndon B. Johnson’s statement on the war on poverty: “The richest nation on earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it.”

The report is organized by a series of indicators designed to measure the country’s progress in reducing poverty and expanding opportunity. These indicators are categorized by policy priority: Poverty in the United States Today; More Good Jobs; Strengthening Families and Communities; and Family Economic Security. Below are some of the key findings that relate to the Asset Building Program’s issue areas:

Access to Higher Education: From 2005-2007 to 2007-2009, the percentage of adults ages 25-34 with an associate’s degree or higher increased from 37.3% to 38.8%. Nevertheless, considerable racial disparities remain. While 45.8% of white adults in this age group have at least an associate’s degree, only 26.5% of Black young adults and 18.1% of Hispanic young adults have the same level of formal education. Moreover, as our own infographic from earlier this year showed, income is playing an ever more important role in determining access to a college degree; consequently, 84% of high-income students enroll in college, compared to only 54% of low-income students.

Retirement Security: Between 2011 and 2012, the percentage of workers in the bottom quarter of the income distribution (making $11.71/hour or less) with access to an employer-sponsored retirement plan remained constant at 41%. By contrast, 70% of workers in the second quarter of the distribution and 88% in the highest quarter had access to a benefit plan. Without retirement savings, many older adults must rely heavily on Social Security benefits to meet all their expenses and are at an increased risk of hunger.

Food Insecurity: Between 2010 and 2011, the rate of food insecurity in the United States held relatively constant, moving up just slightly from 14.5% to 14.9%. A temporary increase in SNAP benefit levels provided by the America Reinvestment and Recovery Act helped stave off a greater increase as many Americans continue to struggle with unemployment in the wake of the Recession. Still, as Hannah Emple noted in a recent blog post, this figure obscures major racial disparities among households experiencing hunger, with over a quarter of both Black and Hispanic families facing food insecurity in 2011 (compared to 11.4% of white households). Furthermore, recent proposals in the House of Representatives call for major cuts to SNAP that would undoubtedly increase food insecurity across the board.

Asset Poverty: From 2006 to 2009, the percentage of households that qualify as asset poor grew from 22.4% to 27.1%. This means that these households have insufficient resources to live at the federal poverty line for three months in the absence of income; in practical terms, it means that these families are unequipped to deal with an unanticipated expense such as a medical emergency or car repair. As one strategy to address this issue, the report calls upon states to lift or eliminate asset tests in public assistance programs, which are a significant barrier to low-income families’ ability to become financially secure and permanently move out of poverty. For a thorough exploration of this issue, check out our recent report about reforms to asset limit policies in SNAP and TANF.

The statistics above are important and useful for assessing the scope of asset poverty and inadequate access to the types of resources that can assure a family’s long-term financial security. Nevertheless, as Angela Sutton of Witnesses to Hunger described, people living in poverty are too frequently reduced to statistics in the policy discussion, and it’s crucial to have more interaction between policymakers and the families most affected by the programs they are shaping. You can access Half in Ten’s full report here; you can also move beyond the statistics by visiting Half in Ten’s storybank or by checking out the Witnesses to Hunger gallery.