MSW 504

Module 12: Screencast

Overview of Current Social Policy and Social Welfare Provision:
1990-2006, Poverty and Welfare Reform

Welcome to Screencast 12. In this screencast, we'll be looking at definitions of poverty and who is poor.
We've spent a great deal of this semester thinking about poverty and this week we're taking a specific
look at some contemporary anti-poverty programs including welfare reform, the earned income tax
credit as well as contemporary definitions and measures of poverty according to the poverty line.

Let's start by just taking a look at the contemporary poverty line and poverty thresholds based on 2012
data. This chart is from the U.S. Bureau of the Census. If we take a look at this chart, we can see the
poverty threshold measures according to family size. The most common measure we probably hear
about is a poverty measure for a family of four.

If you look down to your left, you'll see four people with two children, so it would be a two-child
household. The contemporary poverty line is $23,283 according to 2012 measures. This is not the new
poverty line measure which you've been hearing about in your podcasts and your reading this week, but
the official poverty line measure. When we talk about somebody living below the poverty line, if we're
discussing a family of four, we're talking about a family that's making approximately $23,000.

Let's take a look at poverty statistics for 2011. There are three categories by which I'm breaking these
statistics down although there are many other ways to look at them. Here we're going to talk about
race, native-born or foreign-born meaning essentially immigration status, and then age.

If we start with race, we can see that race remains a large predictor of poverty status in the U.S. The
overall poverty rate for folks living in poverty in 2011 was 15%. For Whites, you can see it's about 12.8%
but if we look at only non-Hispanic Whites, we're close to about 9 or 10%. For Blacks, and these are folks
we're using the term Blacks as opposed to African-American in keeping with language of the census,
we're looking at 27%, so very high poverty rate. For Asians, we're looking at 21% and for Hispanic origin
of any race we're looking at about 25%. Again, we can see great racial disparities and ongoing racial
disparities in terms of poverty rates.

Looking at nativity, meaning folks who are native-born or folks who are foreign-born, we see that native-
born folks have about a 14% rate of poverty. However, for foreign-born folks, we're at about 19%, and if
we look at people who are not citizens in the United States, we again see a very high poverty rate here
of about 24%.

Then finally, age we know is also a large predictor of poverty rate. 18 to 64 year olds, the poverty rate is
about 13%. If we look at the elderly, in 2011 it was 8.7%. If you remember why that is, why we actually
have a lower poverty rate amongst the elderly than amongst younger populations, we can relate this

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back to the success of Social Security. We talked a little bit about this earlier in the semester, how Social
Security has been one of our most successful anti-poverty programs in the United States.

If we look at folks under 18, meaning, children, we can see a large poverty rate here. We have children
in the U.S. have about a 21%, closer to 22% poverty rate at the moment. While this has waxed and
waned over time, many analysts argue that we have a disproportionately high rate of poverty amongst
children in the U.S. because our social programs aimed at children, like TANF, have been historically and
continue to be somewhat unsuccessful at bringing these rates down.

Now let's take a look at family structure. Again, we can see family structure is a major predictor of
poverty status in the U.S. as well. In particular, we know that female-headed households have a high
poverty rate. If we look at this data holistically, we see that female-headed homes, that means homes
with children under 18 living in them, if it's a female-headed household the rate of poverty amongst
these families is 31% compared to married couple family where you see about 6% as well as a male
household, which that would be a father-only family with children under 18 residing in it at 16%.

Again, and as we've spoken about during the semester, we can see there is a relationship between the
poverty rates among children and the fact that we have a rising number of female-headed homes in the
U.S. As we've also discussed, there are multiple factors that contribute to why we have higher rates of
poverty in female-headed households including obviously that there's only one income as opposed to
two, but also due to lower educational level, discrimination in the workplace, and a lack of a more
robust social safety net.

Please feel free to refer back to these statistics during this module and all of this data can be found at
the U.S. Bureau of the Census website.

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