WASHINGTON
(AP) — Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near poverty or
reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating
economic security and an elusive American dream.
Survey
data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy,
the widening gap between rich and poor and loss of good-paying manufacturing
jobs as reasons for the trend.
The findings come as President Barack Obama tries to renew his
administration's emphasis on the economy, saying in recent speeches that his
highest priority is to "rebuild ladders of opportunity" and reverse
income inequality.
Hardship is particularly on the rise among whites, based on several
measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families' economic
futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most
recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy "poor."
"I think it's going to get worse," said Irene Salyers, 52, of Buchanan
County, Va., a declining coal
region in Appalachia. Married and divorced three times,
Salyers now helps run a fruit and vegetable stand with her boyfriend, but it
doesn't generate much income. They live mostly off government disability
checks.
"If you do try to go apply for a job, they're not hiring people, and
they're not paying that much to even go to work," she said. Children, she
said, have "nothing better to do than to get on drugs."
While racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to live in poverty, race
disparities in the poverty rate have narrowed substantially since the 1970s,
census data show. Economic insecurity among whites also is more pervasive than
is shown in government data, engulfing more than 76 percent of white adults by
the time they turn 60, according to a new economic gauge being published next
year by the Oxford University Press.
The gauge defines "economic insecurity" as a year or more of
periodic joblessness, reliance on government aid such as food stamps or income
below 150 percent of the poverty line. Measured across all races, the risk of
economic insecurity rises to 79 percent.
"It's time that America
comes to understand that many of the nation's biggest disparities, from
education and life expectancy to poverty, are increasingly due to economic
class position," said William Julius Wilson, a Harvard professor who
specializes in race and poverty.
He noted that despite continuing economic difficulties, minorities have more
optimism about the future after Obama's election, while struggling whites do
not.
"There is the real possibility that white alienation will increase if
steps are not taken to highlight and address inequality on a broad front,"
Wilson said.
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Sometimes termed "the invisible poor" by demographers,
lower-income whites are generally dispersed in suburbs as well as small rural
towns, where more than 60 percent of the poor are white. Concentrated in Appalachia
in the East, they are also numerous in the industrial Midwest
and spread across America's
heartland, from Missouri, Arkansas
and Oklahoma up through the Great
Plains.
More than 19 million whites fall below the poverty line of $23,021 for a
family of four, accounting for more than 41 percent of the nation's destitute,
nearly double the number of poor blacks.
Still, while census figures provide an official measure of poverty, they're
only a temporary snapshot. The numbers don't capture the makeup of those who
cycle in and out of poverty at different points in their lives. They may be
suburbanites, for example, or the working poor or the laid off.
In 2011 that snapshot showed 12.6 percent of adults in their prime
working-age years of 25-60 lived in poverty. But measured in terms of a
person's lifetime risk, a much higher number — 4 in 10 adults — falls into
poverty for at least a year of their lives.
The risks of poverty also have been increasing in recent decades,
particularly among people ages 35-55, coinciding with widening income
inequality. For instance, people ages 35-45 had a 17 percent risk of
encountering poverty during the 1969-1989 time period; that risk increased to
23 percent during the 1989-2009 period. For those ages 45-55, the risk of
poverty jumped from 11.8 percent to 17.7 percent.
By race, nonwhites still have a higher risk of being economically insecure,
at 90 percent. But compared with the official poverty rate, some of the biggest
jumps under the newer measure are among whites, with more than 76 percent
enduring periods of joblessness, life on welfare or near-poverty.
By 2030, based on the current trend of widening income inequality, close to
85 percent of all working-age adults in the U.S.
will experience bouts of economic insecurity.
"Poverty is no longer an issue of 'them', it's an issue of 'us',"
says Mark Rank, a professor at Washington
University in St.
Louis who calculated the numbers. "Only when
poverty is thought of as a mainstream event, rather than a fringe experience
that just affects blacks and Hispanics, can we really begin to build broader
support for programs that lift people in need."
Rank's analysis is supplemented with figures provided by Tom Hirschl, a
professor at Cornell University;
John Iceland, a sociology professor at Penn
State University;
the University of New
Hampshire's Carsey Institute; the Census Bureau;
and the Population Reference Bureau.
Among the findings:
—For the first time since 1975, the number of white single-mother households
who were living in poverty with children surpassed or equaled black ones in the
past decade, spurred by job losses and faster rates of out-of-wedlock births
among whites. White single-mother families in poverty stood at nearly 1.5
million in 2011, comparable to the number for blacks. Hispanic single-mother
families in poverty trailed at 1.2 million.
—The share of children living in high-poverty neighborhoods — those with
poverty rates of 30 percent or more — has increased to 1 in 10, putting them at
higher risk of teen pregnancy or dropping out of school. Non-Hispanic whites
accounted for 17 percent of the child population in such neighborhoods, up from
13 percent in 2000, even though the overall proportion of white children in the
U.S. has been
declining.
The share of black children in high-poverty neighborhoods dropped sharply,
from 43 percent to 37 percent, while the share of Latino children ticked
higher, from 38 to 39 percent.
___
Going back to the 1980s, never have whites been so pessimistic about their
futures, according to the General Social Survey, which is conducted by NORC at
the University of Chicago.
Just 45 percent say their family will have a good chance of improving their
economic position based on the way things are in America.
The divide is especially evident among those whites who self-identify as
working class: 49 percent say they think their children will do better than
them, compared with 67 percent of non-whites who consider themselves working
class.
Last November, Obama won the votes of just 36 percent of those noncollege
whites, the worst performance of any Democratic nominee among that group since
1984.
Some Democratic analysts have urged renewed efforts to bring working-class
whites into the political fold, calling them a potential "decisive swing
voter group" if minority and youth turnout level off in future elections.
"They don't trust big government, but it doesn't mean they want no
government," says Republican pollster Ed Goeas, who agrees that working-class
whites will remain an important electoral group. "They feel that
politicians are giving attention to other people and not them."
___
AP Director of Polling Jennifer Agiesta, News Survey Specialist Dennis
Junius and AP writer Debra McCown in Buchanan County,
Va., contributed to this report.
