Transcript
MR. GARY BURTLESS: As you would expect, if you pay any attention to the business section of the nation's newspapers, a recession is not a very helpful climate to see family incomes improve. The Census reports issued today show that median household income fell about 1.1 percent between 2001 and 2002, and the median income of family households in the United States fell about almost 1 percent. The worst statistic and probably in some ways the most surprising statistic was that per capita personal income in the United States fell 1.8 percent last year, compared with the previous year.
Now, not surprisingly, these declines in income produce an increase in the overall poverty rate for the United States. Poverty rose .4 of a percentage point to 12.1 percent, and that rise was about the same in every age group. It was about the same for the young and for the 18-64 year-olds and for the aged. Now, this is certainly bad news. There's no way to put a nice spin on it; it's bad news. But it's hardly unexpected, given what we already know about what's happening in the nation's labor markets.
The good news is that the median incomes and incomes at the bottom have held up much better in the last recession than they did in the previous three. One indicator is the poverty-rate change in the first two years after the peak of an economic expansion. Among children, between 1973 and '75, in that recession, the poverty rate was 2.7 percent. In the first two years after 1979, the child poverty rate rose 3.4 percentage points. And in the most recent recession before this one, the child poverty rate was 2.2 percentage points.
So far in this recession, according to these statistics, the child poverty rate has only risen one-half of a percentage point. And this number is mirrored if you look at the people of prime age, people 18 years old to 64 years old. It's the same pattern--the rise in the poverty rate has been much more modest in this recession than it was in the previous two.
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