But poverty is still prevalent across the state, particularly among children and on the border.
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US households experienced a record increase in income previous year, according to a better-than-expected Census Bureau report that indicated the recovery from the Great Recession has gained traction.
Non-Hispanic white households increased by 4.4%.
This year’s print of $56,516 (compared to last year’s $53,718 total) was the first annual increase in this key metric since 2007, the year before the most recent recession began.
The good news was a surprise, given that economic recovery during the Obama Administration, now in its 87 month, has been the slowest economic expansion since 1949 and the poverty rate is still at 2008 levels. Elisabeth Babcock is president and CEO of Boston-based EMPath, which works with low-income families.
Still, we’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: We like good economic news and we don’t really care who claims (or gets) credit for it.
For 2015, the USA government considered a family of four to be in poverty if it’s income was less than $24,250.
Median income is the level at which half of the population earns more and half earns less.
The new Census figures show that poverty has diminished slightly over past year, but Los Angeles still ranks in the top tier of America’s poorest major cities.
In the seven-county Pittsburgh metropolitan area, Armstrong and Washington counties joined Allegheny in reducing their poverty rates, while Beaver, Butler, Fayette and Westmoreland counties experienced more poverty than the year before, according to the American Community Survey. That means 3.5 million fewer people are living in poverty. By 2014, that share had fallen to 49.1 percent.
Despite these notable gains, significant disparities still remain when it comes to the wage gap, poverty and other forms of income inequality.
People living in a household of four that brought in less than $24,257 in 2015 were considered in poverty. Some of the lowest poverty rates were found in Alaska, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey and Vermont.
At the same time, the county’s overall poverty rate rose from 12.5 to 15.2 percent. That’s an increase of a little more than 5 percent.
Also notably, the number of households living in poverty dropped by 1.2 percentage points from 2014 to 2015 to 3.5 million. Along gender lines, both men and women saw their earnings increase but it was women who had the edge. In 2011, the county’s poverty rate was 6.4 percent.
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“We didn’t come out of this recession, which ended nationally in June of 2009, for two and a half more years”, said University of Central Florida economist Sean Snaith.
