Census Shows Americans’ Income Up, Poverty Down

Americans’ real income increased in 1995 for the first time in six years, the Census Bureau said Thursday in its annual economic report, promptly trumpeted by President Clinton as “a good day for our country.”

The analysis also found a decline in the number of poor, including the first time that the elderly had significantly less poverty than working-age Americans.

Median household income for Americans was $34,076 in 1995, up 2.7 percent from the year before and the first real increase in six years, after adjusting for inflation, the Bureau said.

In addition, the agency reported that the number of poor Americans dropped 1.6 million to 36.4 million from 1994 to 1995. That resulted in a decline in the share of Americans living in poverty from 14.5 percent to 13.8 percent. The poverty threshold for a family of four in 1995 was $15,569.

The increase covered both family and non-family households, a first since those distinctions were made in 1980.

Isaac Shapiro, a senior staff member at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, an advocacy group for the poor, noted that problems remain: millions of Americans still lack health insurance, the economy did not improve for Hispanics and poverty remains higher than it has been at times in years past.

Nonetheless, Shapiro was pleased with overall signs of progress and praised the Bureau for what he called “evenhanded” treatment of the statistics in an election year.

The numbers “are not cooked,” he said. “The reputation and integrity of the Census Bureau are both excellent.”

The Midwest led the way in income with a 7.2 percent increase in median household income to $35,839, Weinberg said.

Indeed, the Bureau considered that the only region to have a statistically significant improvement. The change in the rest of the country fell within the statistical margin of error.

Changes in other regions were: West, up 1.6 percent to $35,979; Northeast, up 0.5 percent to $36,111 and South, up 0.2 percent to $30,942.

Median means half of all households had more income and half less. Statisticians prefer to use median, instead of average, which they contend can be distorted by a small number of households with very high incomes.

Also for poverty, the Midwest had the only statistically significant change with a 2 percentage point decline to 11 percent of the population. Poverty in 1995 was 15.7 percent in the South, down from 16.1 percent; 14.9 percent in the West, down from 15.3 percent and 12.5 percent in the Northeast, down from 12.9 percent.

For the first time, Weinberg said, poverty among the elderly fell below that of working-age Americans by a margin the bureau considered statistically significant - 10.5 percent compared with 11.4 percent.

In 1959, Americans aged 65 and over had the nation’s highest poverty rate by age, he noted. By the mid-1970s they had declined to a lower rate than those under age 18 and now they have less poverty that those in the working ages.

Weinberg attributed the improvement to increasing coverage by Social Security and improvements in the availability of private pension plans in recent years.

The report reinforces the economic improvement heralded at the end of 1995 when the Agriculture Department reported that the number of Americans collecting food stamps fell below 26 million for the first time in three years. At its peak in March 1994, the program helped 28 million people buy groceries.

Other findings of the report included: There were 40.6 million people without health insurance in 1995, 15.4 percent of the population, unchanged from the year before.

Median income for blacks increased 3.6 percent to $22,292. For whites it was up 2.2 percent to $34,992. Income for Asians was down 2.4 percent to $40,614 and for Hispanics - who can be of any race - it fell 5.1 percent to $22,860.

Hispanics had the highest poverty rate at 30.3 percent, followed by blacks, 29.3 percent; Asians, 14.6 percent and whites, 11.2 percent.

Poverty was 13.0 percent for native-born Americans. Foreign-born naturalized citizens had a 10.5 percent rate while 27.8 percent of foreign-born non-citizens lived in poverty.

Poverty among children, those aged under 18, was 20.8 percent, down from 21.8 percent a year earlier.

The findings are based on the Current Population Survey, a monthly study of about 50,000 households across the country.