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 the
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.
As nonwhites approach a
numerical majority in the U.S., one question is how public programs to
lift the disadvantaged should be best focused - on the affirmative
action that historically has tried to eliminate the racial barriers seen
as the major impediment to economic equality, or simply on improving
socioeconomic status for all, regardless of race.
Hardship
is particularly growing 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 the government's poverty 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 experiencing unemployment at some point in their working lives, or a
year or more of 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.
Marriage
rates are in decline across all races, and the number of white
mother-headed households living in poverty has risen to the level of
black ones.
"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.
---
Nationwide,
the count of America's poor remains stuck at a record number: 46.2
million, or 15 percent of the population, due in part to lingering high
unemployment following the recession. While poverty rates for blacks and
Hispanics are nearly three times higher, by absolute numbers the
predominant face of the poor is white.
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.
Sometimes
termed "the invisible poor" by demographers, lower-income whites
generally are 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 numerous in the industrial Midwest and spread
across America's heartland, from Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma up
through the Great Plains.
Buchanan County, in
southwest Virginia, is among the nation's most destitute based on median
income, with poverty hovering at 24 percent. The county is mostly
white, as are 99 percent of its poor.
More
than 90 percent of Buchanan County's inhabitants are working-class
whites who lack a college degree. Higher education long has been seen
there as nonessential to land a job because well-paying mining and
related jobs were once in plentiful supply. These days many residents
get by on odd jobs and government checks.
Salyers'
daughter, Renee Adams, 28, who grew up in the region, has two children.
A jobless single mother, she relies on her live-in boyfriend's
disability checks to get by. Salyers says it was tough raising her own
children as it is for her daughter now, and doesn't even try to
speculate what awaits her grandchildren, ages 4 and 5.
Smoking
a cigarette in front of the produce stand, Adams later expresses a wish
that employers will look past her conviction a few years ago for
distributing prescription painkillers, so she can get a job and have
money to "buy the kids everything they need."
"It's pretty hard," she said. "Once the bills are paid, we might have $10 to our name."
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Census
figures provide an official measure of poverty, but they're only a
temporary snapshot that doesn'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.
Higher
recent rates of unemployment mean the lifetime risk of experiencing
economic insecurity now runs even higher: 79 percent, or 4 in 5 adults,
by the time they turn 60.
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."
The numbers come from Rank's analysis
being published by the Oxford University Press. They are supplemented
with interviews and figures provided to the AP 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
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.
-Since
2000, the poverty rate among working-class whites has grown faster than
among working-class nonwhites, rising 3 percentage points to 11 percent
as the recession took a bigger toll among lower-wage workers. Still,
poverty among working-class nonwhites remains higher, at 23 percent.
-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 teenage pregnancy or dropping out of school.
Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 17 percent of the child population in
such neighborhoods, compared with 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 from 43
percent to 37 percent, while the share of Latino children went from 38
percent to 39 percent.
-Race disparities in
health and education have narrowed generally since the 1960s. While
residential segregation remains high, a typical black person now lives
in a nonmajority black neighborhood for the first time. Previous studies
have shown that wealth is a greater predictor of standardized test
scores than race; the test-score gap between rich and low-income
students is now nearly double the gap between blacks and whites.
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Going
back to the 1980s, never have whites been so pessimistic about their
futures, according to the General Social Survey, a biannual survey
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. Forty-nine percent say they think their children will do
better than them, compared with 67 percent of nonwhites who consider
themselves working class, even though the economic plight of minorities
tends to be worse.
Although they are a
shrinking group, working-class whites - defined as those lacking a
college degree - remain the biggest demographic bloc of the working-age
population. In 2012, Election Day exit polls conducted for the AP and
the television networks showed working-class whites made up 36 percent
of the electorate, even with a notable drop in white voter turnout.
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 Republican Ronald Reagan's 1984 landslide victory over Walter
Mondale.
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. "In 2016 GOP messaging will
be far more focused on expressing concern for `the middle class' and
`average Americans,'" Andrew Levison and Ruy Teixeira wrote recently in
The New Republic.
"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. His research found that many of
them would support anti-poverty programs if focused broadly on job
training and infrastructure investment. This past week, Obama pledged
anew to help manufacturers bring jobs back to America and to create jobs
in the energy sectors of wind, solar and natural gas.
"They feel that politicians are giving attention to other people and not them," Goeas said.
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AP
Director of Polling Jennifer Agiesta, News Survey Specialist Dennis
Junius and AP writer Debra McCown in Buchanan County, Va., contributed
to this report.
