A People’s History of Poverty in the US

When you live in a shelter, other people control your life. They tell you when you may come in and when you must go out. They tell you when you can take your shower and when you can wash your clothing.

"Even by the standards established by the Social Security Administration, poverty in America is widespread. And it is particularly useful in this regard to asked how many Americans were ever poor. Researchers Mark Rank and Thomas Hirschl have done just that, and their findings strike at the heart of the claim that poverty is a state confined to a minority of Americans. By the time they reach the age of seventy-five 58.5 per cent of Americans will have been officially poor at least once, with an income at or below 100 per cent of the poverty line. Some 68 percent of Americans will survive on 125 per cent of the official standard, and fully three-quarters will have incomes below 150 percent of the poverty line. Worse, by age seventy- five, almost one third of Americans will be very poor, with incomes at only half the official poverty line. And, lest we conclude that these are isolated incidents of one-time hardship, some 30 percent of those who are poor at least once are poor for five years or more. For the majority poverty is an event, and for nearly a third, it's a durable condition.

Still, we misdiagnose the problem, for these are data about the entire population, and it's worse for particular groups of Americans. By the time they reach age seventy-five, for example, over 90 percent of African Americans can expect to have experienced poverty; for people with less than a high school education, it is over 75 percent. One third of our children can expect to live in poverty at some point. But if they are black, the number is 69.5 percent. If they are raised by a single mom with less than a high school diploma, 99.4 percent will be poor. And while we might make much, and rightly so, of the advances that Social Security has brought us, between age sixty and ninety over 40 percent of Americans will still be poor- by the official measures- at least once."