Title. With the pandemic, shit has gone very, very bad for a lot of people in the USA. As in, not enough food kind of poor. No rent kind of poor. No electricity and water kind of poor.
There's what I want to know : is there a site that gives a more accurate figure than the absolutely ridiculous 10% from the official numbers ? Some fucking neolib institutes give the insane number of 3 fucking percents, and these are all over the google results. How can someone calculate/find the real, actual poverty rate ? While it's relatively easier to find actual unemployment figures, poverty seems to be far harder to get.
In fact, from unemployment alone, you'd get like 25% of the population, and the quantity of people working several jobs has increased drastically the last years, putting them above the 12k poverty line. That number is roughly 13.5% of the population from what I have seen, so even with the official unemployment numbers, you get 25% of the population. Some numbers indicate two thirds of Americans wouldn't be able to pay for a 500$ expense, so really, I don't know if the real poverty rate isn't around 40 to 50%, if not more ?
https://www.povertycenter.columbia.edu/news-internal/2020/forecasting-poverty/expiring-cares-act-jan-poverty-rise
This source could be helpful i think. They use a poverty model beyond the "income cut off." This is their predictions for January under different scenarios (click Download Brief)
Edit: If the unemployment bolsters from the CARES Act expire, they predict the poverty rate will climb to 17.5%
As of December 2020, two unemployment provisions of the CARES Act remain in place until the end of the year: Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA), which expands eligibility for unemployment benefits, and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC), which extends the duration of unemployment insurance coverage. If the PUA and PEUC expire, we find that the number of individuals in poverty in January 2021 will increase by approximately 4.8 million.
I can't find their actual numbers for November. But my phone sucks.
Yeah, there seems to be a gap between September (which is covered in their big working paper) to the above predictions. But here's an overview of that paper:
Our findings suggest that rates of monthly poverty increased from around 15 percent in February 2020 to 16.7 percent in September 2020, even after taking the CARES Act’s transfers into account. In April 2020, the peak of the crisis so far, the CARES Act effectively blunted a rise in poverty rates, contributing to a decline in poverty of 5.5 percentage points relative to what would have occurred in the absence of those benefits. However, the expiration of the CARES Act’s core benefits – the stimulus checks and $600 per week unemployment supplement – contributed to monthly poverty rates above pre-crisis levels by September 2020. Our projections suggest, however, that the CARES Act’s income supports were not successful in fully blunting the rise in deep poverty, defined as having resources below half the poverty threshold.
Black and Hispanic individuals faced high rates of monthly poverty relative to white individuals before the crisis, but these differences have been magnified after the crisis and after the expiration of the $600 per week unemployment supplements, in particular. By September, the monthly poverty rate for Black and Hispanic individuals was 25.2 percent and 25.8 percent, respectively, compared to 12 percent for white individuals.
I don't have an answer, but I also have bad news lol.
You have to be careful with those unemployment figures, because they are politicized as well, and gamed through control of their definitions. I watched a Hedges video a while ago where it came up in the conversation, but I'm still looking for it. They play games with it like: If you are unemployed for x amount of time, they stop counting you, that sort of thing.
Yea, and the ones who simply give up on looking for a job altogether and won't bother applying for it. Shit is fucked.