Family Income Breakdown

The annual income, poverty, and health insurance report comes out.

At the beginning of the week, the news was that the poverty rate would jump to a record "about 15%" for 2009. The Associated Press had polled experts too antsy to wait for the actual report, which came out today, showing a jump to only 14.3%, up from 13.2% in 2008.

The full report, with trends, allows a breakdown of family income-to-needs ratios. (That's better than just income, because family composition is bouncing around during the recession, so you need to take into account how many people are in each family.) That income-need ratio is, by definition, 1.0 at the poverty line, and numbers above that are multiples of needs, so 3.0 is income of 3-times the poverty line.

By race/ethnicity for the last 8 years, this is how it looks:

Source: My chart from this spreadsheet.

This view allows us to see the size of the White advantage, the income breakdowns within each group, and the changes within each group.

So, for example, the richest 5th of Whites are above 11-times the poverty line, while the poorest 5th of Whites are (on average) just above the poverty line. In contrast, the richest 5th of Blacks and Latinos are around 7-times the poverty line, and 40% of both groups are below 1.5-times the poverty line.

Cross posted from the Family Inequality blog.

 

Comments

[notAMoron]

02:31 PM on 09/16/2010

Why did you omit asians? They have an even greater advantage than whites.

Also interesting is that the greatest inequality (spread between the lowest 5th and highest 5th) is among blacks at 15x compared to 11x for all races.

[Philip N. Cohen]

02:56 PM on 09/16/2010

Asians, like American Indians, are not well captured by the Current Population Survey, which is the source for these numbers. Asians are a very diverse group -- including relatively rich and poor subgroups, by national origin -- and yet the total sample is small. That is a problem with all groups to some extent, but the combination of small size and great disparities is worst among Asians.

[notAMoron]

04:34 PM on 09/16/2010

I don't think those issues should merit exclusion from your chart though. According to the spreadsheet there are 3,600,000 Asian households, 4.5% of all households and it seems arbitrary and disrespectful to cut Asians off.

Don't they deserve credit for succeeding and overcoming headwinds of immigration to achieve the American dream?

[notAMoron]

04:41 PM on 09/16/2010

And by the way, in case you didn't know all groups are diverse groups. "Whites" represent more than 50 different nationalities with European, Australian, and Canadian heritage. "Latinos" come from 30 different central and south american countries. And blacks came from more than 50 different countries and countless tribes before there were countries in Africa.