Severe poverty growing worse

from the Fort Worth Star Telegram

By TONY PUGH
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON - The percentage of poor Americans living in severe poverty has reached at least a 32-year high, millions of working Americans are falling closer to the poverty line, and the gulf between the nation's "haves" and "have-nots" continues to widen.

A McClatchy Newspapers analysis of 2005 Census figures, the latest available, found that nearly 16 million Americans are living in deep or severe poverty. A family of four with two children and an annual income of less than $9,903 -- half the federal poverty line -- was considered severely poor in 2005. So were individuals who made less than $5,080 a year.

The McClatchy analysis found that the number of severely poor Americans grew 26 percent from 2000 to 2005. That's 56 percent faster than the overall poverty population grew in the same period. McClatchy's review also found statistically significant increases in the percentage of the population in severe poverty in 65 of 215 large U.S. counties and similar increases in 28 states.

The review also suggested that the rise in severely poor Americans isn't confined to large urban counties but extends to suburban and rural areas.

Fueled by illegal immigration, Texas is second only to California in the number of severely poor residents, with 1.62 million, and is tied with Arkansas and Alabama for the fifth-highest deep-poverty rate in the nation: 7.3 percent.

But Tarrant County was one of only three counties in Texas that saw a decline in its deep-poverty rate from 2000 to 2005.

The plight of the severely poor is a distressing sidebar to an unusual economic expansion. Worker productivity has increased dramatically since the brief recession of 2001, but wages and job growth have lagged behind.

The share of national income going to corporate profits has dwarfed the amount going to wages and salaries. That helps explain why the median household income of working-age families, adjusted for inflation, has fallen for five consecutive years.

These and other factors have helped push 43 percent of the nation's 37 million poor people into deep poverty -- the highest rate since at least 1975. The share of poor Americans in deep poverty has climbed slowly but steadily for three decades.

But since 2000, the number of severely poor has grown "more than any other segment of the population," according to a recent study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

"That was the exact opposite of what we anticipated when we began," said Dr. Steven Woolf of Virginia Commonwealth University, who co-authored the study. "We're not seeing as much moderate poverty as a proportion of the population. What we're seeing is a dramatic growth of severe poverty."

The growth, which leveled off in 2005, in part reflects how hard it is for low-skilled workers to earn their way out of poverty in a job market that favors skilled and educated workers.

It also suggests that social programs aren't as effective as they once were at catching those who fall into economic despair.

About 1 in 3 severely poor people are under age 17, and nearly 2 in 3 are female.

Female-headed families with children account for a large share of the severely poor.

Nearly 2 in 3 people (10.3 million) in severe poverty are white, but blacks (4.3 million) and Hispanics of any race (3.7 million) make up disproportionate shares.

Blacks are nearly three times as likely as non-Hispanic whites to be in deep poverty, while Hispanics are roughly twice as likely.

Washington, D.C., has a higher concentration of severely poor people -- 10.8 percent in 2005 -- than any of the 50 states.

The problem of severe poverty is most pronounced, however, in towns near the Mexican border and in some areas of the South, where 6.5 million severely poor residents are struggling to find work as manufacturing jobs in the textile, apparel and furniture industries disappear.

Two Texas border counties had the nation's highest rates of deep poverty among counties with at least 250,000 people: Cameron County at 21.5 percent and Hidalgo County with 19.6 percent.

The Midwestern Rust Belt and areas of the Northeast have been hard hit as economic restructuring and foreign competition have forced numerous plant closings. At the same time, low-skilled immigrants with impoverished family members are increasingly drawn to the South and Midwest to work in meatpacking, food processing and agriculture.

"What appears to be taking place is that, over the long term, you have a significant permanent underclass that is not being impacted by anti-poverty policies," said Michael Tanner, the director of Health and Welfare Studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

Arloc Sherman, a senior researcher at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank, disagreed.

"It doesn't look like a growing permanent underclass," said Sherman, whose organization has chronicled the growth of deep poverty. "What you see in the data are more and more single moms with children who lose their jobs and who aren't being caught by a safety net anymore."

Over the last two decades, the U.S. has had the highest or near-highest poverty rates for children, individual adults and families among 31 developed countries, according to the Luxembourg Income Study, a 23-year project that compares poverty and income data from industrial nations.

"It's shameful," said Timothy Smeeding, the former director of the study and the current head of the Center for Policy Research at Syracuse University. "We've been the worst performer every year since we've been doing this study."

With the exception of Mexico and Russia, the U.S. devotes the smallest portion of its gross domestic product to federal poverty programs, and those programs are among the least effective at reducing poverty, the study found.

Barbara Barrett contributed to this report.

EXTREME POVERTY GROWTH IN TEXAS

Harris County: Leads the nation, gaining 84,042 extremely poor residents between 2000 and 2005.

Hidalgo County: No. 4 nationally, adding 64,072.

Cameron County: No. 8, adding 31,622.

Dallas County: No. 12, adding 27,602.

Montgomery County: No. 6 nationally in percentage growth, up 149 percent.

Tarrant, Collin and Fort Bend counties: The only large counties in Texas to see declines in the deep-poverty rate from 2000 to 2005.