32 Million Live in Poverty, Census Bureau Reports

Nearly 32 million Americans lived in poverty in 1988, the Census Bureau reported Wednesday, marking the second straight year in which the nation made no significant inroads against poverty despite a continuing economic expansion.

“It looks like this is as low as it’s going to get for a while, and it isn’t very low,” said Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a private research group. “It is disturbing that, despite a sixth year of economic recovery, both the nation’s poverty rate and the income of a typical household showed no significant improvement.”

However, the Census Bureau found some cause for encouragement in the report, pointing to a 1.7% increase in per-capita personal income last year.

“It’s a year basically in which most groups stayed the same or improved,” said William Butz, the agency’s associate director for demographics.

The poverty rate fell from 13.4% in 1987 to 13.1% last year, and the number of impoverished people dropped from 32.3 million to 31.9 million.

Whites, blacks and Latinos made no significant gains in 1988, leaving wide gaps between the three groups’ poverty rates: 10.1% for whites, 31.6% for blacks and 26.8% for Latinos.

Both the number of poor people and the poverty rate have been inching down since 1983, but each still exceeds the recent low points, set in 1978, when the poverty rate was 11.4% and 24.5 million people were impoverished.

The poverty line last year was $12,092 for a family of four.

Greenstein said that there has been a lack of progress against poverty recently because the benefits of the economic expansion are flowing disproportionately to the wealthiest Americans.

The poorest fifth of the population received 4.6% of total national family income in 1988, the lowest percentage since 1954, but the richest fifth received 44%, the highest ever recorded, he said.

The Census Bureau reported also a jump in real per-capita income last year, to a new high of $13,120. Blacks made bigger gains than whites but still lagged far behind.

Income of whites rose 1.5% to $13,900; income of blacks increased 3.9% to $8,270. Per-capita income of Latinos was virtually unchanged at $7,960.

There were notable income gains in certain parts of the country. Median household income shot up 3.7% to $30,430 in the Northeast and rose 2.6% in the Midwest to $27,540. Household income dropped 1.4% in the South to $24,610 and 0.6% in the West to $28,840, but neither decrease was considered significant.