WASHINGTON — The number of people in the U.S. who are in poverty is on track for a record increase on President Barack Obama’s watch, with the ranks of working-age poor approaching 1960s levels that led to the national war on poverty.
Census figures for 2009 — the recession-ravaged first year of the Democrat’s presidency — are to be released in the coming week, and demographers expect grim findings.
It’s unfortunate timing for Obama and his party seven weeks before elections in which control of Congress is at stake. The anticipated poverty rate increase — from 13.2 percent to about 15 percent — would be another blow to Democrats struggling to persuade voters to keep them in power.
“The most important anti-poverty effort is growing the economy and making sure there are enough jobs out there,” Obama said Friday at a White House news conference. He stressed his commitment to helping the poor achieve middle-class status and said, “If we can grow the economy faster and create more jobs, then everybody is swept up into that virtuous cycle.”
Interviews with six demographers who track poverty trends found wide consensus that 2009 figures are likely to show a significant rate increase to between 14.7 percent and 15 percent.
Should those estimates hold true, about 45 million people in this country, or more than 1 in 7, were poor last year. It would be the highest single- year increase since the government began calculating poverty figures in 1959. The previous high was in 1980, when the rate jumped 1.3 percentage points to 13 percent during the energy crisis.
Among the 18-to-64 working-age population, the demographers expect a rise beyond 12.4 percent, up from 11.7 percent. That would make it the highest since at least 1965, when another Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson, launched the war on poverty that expanded the federal government’s role in social welfare programs from education to health care.
“My guess is that politically these figures will be greeted with alarm and dismay, but they won’t constitute a clarion call to action,” said William Galston, a domestic policy aide for former President Bill Clinton. “I hope the parties don’t blame each other for the desperate circumstances of desperate people. That would be wrong in my opinion.”
Lawrence Mead, a New York University political science professor who is a conservative and wrote “The New Politics of Poverty: The Nonworking Poor in America,” argued that the figures will have a minimal impact in November.
“Poverty is not as big an issue right now as middle-class unemployment,” he said. “That’s a lot more salient politically right now.”
But if the report Thursday is as troubling as expected, Republicans in the midst of an increasingly strong drive to win control of the House, if not the Senate, would get one more argument to make against Democrats in the campaign homestretch.
Democrats almost certainly will argue that the economic woes — and the poverty increase — began under President George W. Bush with the near-collapse of the financial industry in late 2008.
Although that is true, it’s far from certain that the Democratic explanation will sway voters.
In 2008, the poverty level stood at $22,025 for a family of four, based on an official government calculation that includes only cash income before tax deductions.
Beginning next year, the government plans to publish new, supplemental poverty figures that are expected to show even higher numbers of people in poverty than previously known. The figures will take into account rising costs of medical care, transportation and child care, a change analysts believe will add to the ranks of both seniors and working-age people in poverty.
