The Poverty Rate Just Declined for the First Time Since 2006
The percentage of Americans living in poverty declined year-over-year for the first time since 2006 last year, according to a report released Tuesday by the United States Census Bureau. 45.3 million Americans, or 14.5 of the population, lived below the poverty line in 2013, down from 15 in 2012. The percentage of children under the age of 18 living in poverty declined to 19.9 in 2013, down from 21.8 the preceding year. It was the first recorded drop in childhood poverty since 2000. The officially defined poverty threshold for a family of four in 2013 was 23,834. Nonetheless, the report emphasized that the long-awaited declines in poverty were not quite large enough to be considered statistically significant improvements i.e. definitively greater than a measurement error. The general findings of the report, entitled Income and Poverty in the United States 2013, was that the measures of poverty had plateaued, with household income registering a statistically insignificant uptick to 51,939, an improvement of 180 over the previous year.