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Title: Economic Security Programs Reduce Overall Poverty, Racial and Ethnic Inequities Stronger Policies Needed to Make Further Progress

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2021

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Abstract: Our success as a nation depends on whether all people, regardless of race or ethnicity, have the opportunity to thrive. Economic security programs such as Social Security, food assistance, tax credits, and housing assistance can help provide opportunity by ameliorating short-term poverty and hardship and, by doing so, improving children’s long-term outcomes. Over the last half-century, these assistance programs have reduced poverty for millions of people — including children, who are highly susceptible to poverty’s ill effects. At the same time, barriers to opportunity, including discrimination and disparities in access to employment, education, and health care, remain enormous and keep poverty rates much higher for some racial and ethnic groups than others. While government programs have done much to narrow these disparities in poverty, further progress will require stronger government efforts to reduce poverty and discrimination and build opportunity for all. Between 1970 and 2017 the poverty rate fell for all groups, but it fell even more for Black and Latino people: by 25 and 27 percentage points, respectively, compared to 8 percentage points for white non-Latino people, we calculate. 1 Even with this reduction, poverty rates for Black and Latino people remained far above the white poverty rate. Our series begins in 1970, the first year that data on Latino ethnicity are available, and ends in 2017, the latest year that data on underreporting of key government benefits are available. (Rather than the official poverty measure, this report uses a variant of the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which among other advantages incorporates the value of non-cash and tax-based benefits, as we detail below.) Economic security programs have become more effective at reducing poverty and racial disparities over the last five decades. In 1970, families’ government benefits and the taxes they paid lowered the white poverty rate by 2 percentage points and the Black poverty rate by 4 percentage points, and increased the Latino poverty rate by 3 percentage points (because their tax payments outweighed their government benefits). In contrast, in 2017, accounting for government benefits and taxes lowered the white poverty rate by 12 percentage points, Black poverty by 16 percentage points, and Latino poverty by 12 percentage points. (See Figure 1.)

Url: https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/resrep28437.pdf

Url: https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep28437

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Authors: Trisi, Danilo; Saenz, Matt

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Data Collections: IPUMS CPS

Topics: Poverty and Welfare, Race and Ethnicity, Work, Family, and Time

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