Census Bureau Reports 16.1% Poverty Rate

Another round of news on poverty in the U.S. — this time from the Census Bureau’s latest report on the results of analyses using its Supplemental Poverty Measure.

Once again, the national poverty rate is higher than the rate the Bureau earlier reported, using its official measure — 16.1%, as compared to 15.1%.

In other words, about 3 million more people — a total of nearly 49.7 million — were living in poverty last year.

On the other hand, the percent of people living in extreme poverty, i.e., below 50% of the applicable threshold, is 1.5% lower than the official measure shows.

We get a mixed picture for state-level poverty rates, for which the Bureau uses three-year averages. Some of the rates are higher than the official rate. Some lower.

The rate for the District of Columbia rises sharply — from 19% to 23.2%. This is higher than the rate for any state except California.

As I’ve written before, the official measure sets poverty thresholds at three times the annually adjusted costs of what used to be the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s cheapest food plan.

The SPM starts from the costs of basic living expenses, adjusted for differences among major geographic areas and also differences in living situations, e.g., renting versus owning.

To these, it adds some other “necessary expenses,” e.g., payroll taxes, health care co-pays and other out-of-pocket costs.

On the other side of the ledger, it takes account of not only cash income, but some “near-money” federal benefits like tax credits and also some in-kind benefits, e.g., food stamps, two forms of child nutrition assistance, housing subsidies.

And it uses actual household size, rather than counting only household members who are related to one another, as the official measure does.

These differences explain not only the difference between the overall SPM rate and the official rate, but shifts in rates for different age and race/ethnicity groups.

We see, for example, that:

• The child poverty rate drops from 22.3% to 18.1%, reducing the number of children in poverty by about 3 million.
• The poverty rate for seniors rises from 8.7% to 15.1%, increasing the number of poor people 65 and older by somewhat more than 2.6 million.
• The poverty rate for blacks drops from 27.8% to 25.7% — still far higher than the non-Hispanic white rate of 11%, but now 2.3% lower than the rate for Hispanics.
• The poverty rate for Asians rises from 12.3% to 16.9% — the largest percent change for any race/ethnicity group reported.
• For children, the extreme poverty rate is less than half what it is under the official measure — 5.1%, as compared to 10.3%.
• For seniors, however, the extreme poverty rate rises — from 2.3% to 4.3%.

This year’s report is unusually timely because it gives us a read on the anti-poverty effects of some benefits that are at immediate risk. It tells us that:

• Food stamp benefits lifted more than 4.6 million people, including  about 2.1 million children, out of poverty last year.
• Well over 8.6 million more people, including nearly 4.7 million children, would have fallen below the poverty threshold if their family’s disposable income hadn’t been boosted by refundable tax credits.
• Unemployment insurance benefits kept nearly 3.4 million people out of poverty — mostly adults, but about 963,400 children too.
• And Social Security — the single most effective anti-poverty program we’ve got — accounted for 25.6 million fewer poor people than there would have been without its benefits. Poverty rates for all age groups would have been higher. The rate for seniors would have soared to 54.1%.

So there are the benefits. Now here are the risks.

The farm bills now pending in Congress would cut food stamp benefits for at least half a million households — 1.3 million if the House version prevails. The House bill would also mean no more food stamps at all for as many as 3 million people.

As you’re well aware, the Bush-era tax cuts are expiring. We can be quite confident that most will be renewed.

But Congressional Republicans want to extend earlier versions of the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit, not the expanded versions that have made a significant difference to low-income working families.

The federal program that funds unemployment insurance benefits for longer-term jobless workers will also soon expire. Some two million workers and their families may face the new year with no source of cash income.

Lead Republicans in Congress are about to sit at the bargaining table with their Democratic counterparts and White House officials to thrash out an alternative to the so-called fiscal cliff.

They say they’ll be amenable to increased revenues (not to be confused with higher tax rates for the wealthiest 2%).

But the deal must also include “real changes to the financial structure of entitlement programs” — apparently something along the lines of the recommendations in the plan produced by the co-chairs of the President’s fiscal commission, a.k.a. Bowles-Simpson.

These recommendations would cut Social Security retirement benefits in several different ways. With the average benefit now only $1,230 a month, we could see more seniors in poverty if the Democrats don’t hold firm to the position they’re taking now.

NOTE: A couple of the benefits impact figures reported by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities are a bit higher than mine. This is also true for figures reported by the Center for American Progress. I’m at a loss to explain the discrepancies.

Who Are Those Folks Who Don’t Pay Federal Income Taxes?

You recall, I’m sure, the 47% of Americans who don’t pay income tax and thus can’t be persuaded to “take personal responsibility and care for themselves.”

Romney’s since said his statement was “completely wrong” — undoubtedly referring to the part that wrote all these people off because the part about 47% not paying federal income taxes is basically correct. Or would be if we substitute “households” for “people.”

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities dug into data from a Census survey and the Tax Policy Center to find out who they are.

Not surprisingly, 22% of the non-payers are elderly — many of them presumably former low-wage workers now trying to get by on Social Security benefits or very elderly people who now rely on Social Security because they’ve exhausted whatever they had in retirement savings.

But the tax code gives seniors some special preferences. Their standard deduction is higher, for example. And all or some portion of their Social Security benefits may be tax-exempt.

These preferences, plus a credit for those with low incomes help explain why so many elderly filers wind up not owing anything.

Another 17% of the non-payers are students, people who aren’t working because they’re too sick or too severely disabled and some heterogeneous others, e.g., jobless workers, those who retired early (maybe because they couldn’t find jobs.)

Which leaves a surprising 61% who are working, as indicated by the fact that they pay, through deductions, the taxes that go to Social Security and Medicare.

About half of these people don’t pay federal income taxes simply because they don’t earn enough. The standard deduction, plus however many personal exemptions they’re entitled to brings their taxable income down to zero, as Roberton Williams at the Tax Policy Center explains.

Another 30.4% of working families, especially those with children don’t owe federal income taxes because the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit and, in some cases, the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit wipe out whatever tax they’d otherwise owe.

I personally have some difficulty understanding why I should be able to claim a higher standard deduction just because I’ve managed to live past the age of 65.

The tax breaks for working families are an altogether different story.

Anyone, I think, can understand why federal policymakers — Republicans as well as Democrats — decided to give low-income parents an incentive to work instead of relying on welfare benefits.

Also why they expanded the incentives when they ended welfare as we knew it, putting time limits on the benefits and setting the stage for the extraordinarily low level of support they now provide.

What’s difficult for me to understand is why Congressional Republicans — and apparently Romney as well — want to let the EITC and Child Tax Credit revert to their narrower pre-Recovery Act forms.

These, after all, are tax preferences that support core bipartisan values — work, marriage, child rearing, etc.

They also, in and of themselves, reduce the official poverty rate, as CBPP’s analysis of the 2010 Census figures shows.

If their end result is some 11.5 million or so working families owing no federal income taxes, that’s mainly because our policymakers prefer spending through the tax code rather than directly, as outlays in the annual budget.

Has nothing whatever to do with defects in personal responsibility — or, it seems, lead to solid support for the President, though some might say it would if the 47% voted their enlightened self-interest.

What’s at Stake for DC If the Expanded EITC and Child Tax Credit Die?

Yesterday, the House passed a bill to extend the Bush tax cuts that’s virtually identical to the Senate Republicans’ recently defeated bill — this after defeating an alternative much like what the Senate passed.

What will happen next is anybody’s guess. What will happen if the Republicans finally prevail on the issue of the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit isn’t — thanks to some great number-crunching by Citizens for Tax Justice.

As I earlier wrote, the Republicans don’t want to extend the tax credits in their current forms, i.e., with expansions originally made by the Recovery Act.

Without them, parents with more than two children wouldn’t get as large an EITC credit as they can now. And married couples would again incur a significant “marriage penalty.”

The refundable Child Tax Credit wouldn’t be available at all for very low-income working families. Refunds would be much smaller for many others because they’re a percent of income above a threshold that would rise from $3,000 to about $13,300 initially — and keep rising as time went on.

CTJ provides state-by-state breakouts for some of the impacts. Here’s what it tells us about the District of Columbia, with some additional observations from me.

In 2013 alone:

• Nearly 7,940 District families, including an estimated 11,673 children, could no longer get any Child Tax Credit refund.
• These families, plus those who could still claim the credit would collectively lose $7.6 million — a hit to not only their budgets, but our local economy because there’d be that much less for them to spend.
• About 8,285 families, including 24,435 children, would lose some portion of their federal EITC.
• These losses would total $5.3 million.

Families would also lose out because the District’s own EITC is linked to the federal. Taxpayers can get 35% of whatever their federal credit is — and reimbursements if claiming the credit brings the taxes they owe to less than zero.

Rough back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that total EITC losses could be well over $7.1 million.

In 2010, 1.6 million more people would have fallen below the poverty line if the Recovery Act hadn’t expanded the EITC and Child Tax Credit, according to analyses by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Hard to believe we wouldn’t have more District families in poverty if Congress extends the credits in their earlier, more restrictive forms.

Republicans Say No Tax Increases, Except for Low-Income Working Families

As I remarked earlier, Republicans in Congress don’t actually want to prevent tax increases for everybody.

The votes in the Senate last week confirm this. And the upcoming vote in the House almost certainly will as well.

The Republicans — Mitt Romney included — are dead set against increases for the wealthiest 2% of households — those who’d pay more if the two top tax brackets reverted to their pre-Bush levels.

They’re bound and determined to preserve the huge estate tax giveaway — an additional $1.1 million, on average, for heirs to the wealthiest 0.3% of estates.

But they’re opposed to extensions of the current Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit — both expanded by the Recovery Act and then extended, in their current forms, as part of the December 2010 tax cut/unemployment insurance deal.

These tax credits, they say, were temporary stimulus measures. “Stimulus” is, as we know, a pejorative when used by Republicans, who are heavily invested in claiming the Recovery Act failed.

The rest of the Bush tax cuts were also nominally temporary and initially sold as a stimulus. But this is nit-picking, I suppose.

What ought to concern us now is what will happen to low-income families if the Republicans get their way.

Citizens for Tax Justice has a new brief that answers this question — though not entirely — both for the nation as a whole and for each state and the District of Columbia.

Refundable Tax Credit Basics

As you probably know, the EITC is a refundable tax credit available to low and moderate-income working families.

In other words, if the credit, plus deductions and other credits they can claim leaves the amount they owe at less than zero, they get a check for the difference from the Internal Revenue Service.

The credit they get — thus the reimbursement, if any — phases out until it disappears. At what income level depends on family structure.

When we talk about the Child Tax Credit in this context, we’re actually talking about a technically separate additional credit that’s partially refundable.

Parents can get up to 15% of their earnings refunded, but only if they’ve earned more than a set minimum. Both the credit itself and the refundable amount are capped at $1,000 per child.

Expiring Recovery Act Improvements

Before the Recovery Act, the EITC provided no additional credit for families with three or more children. And its structure imposed a severe “marriage penalty” because the phase-out was the same for individual filers and couples filing jointly.

The Recovery Act added a tier for larger families and a separate phase-out schedule for the joint filers.

The refundable Child Tax Credit could be claimed only by parents with incomes over $12,050* — and only for earnings above this amount.

So it wasn’t available for the lowest-income families at all. And refunds were well below the $1,000 maximum for those who didn’t earn much more than the threshold.

The Recovery Act dropped the threshold for claiming the credit to $3,000 — thus also the point at which the 15% starts to kick in.

What No Extensions Would Mean

If the two tax credits revert to their pre-2009 forms, 13.6 million families, including 25.7 million children, would lose, on average, $843 in 2013 alone, according to the CTJ brief.

But losses for some would be considerably greater.

For example, a married couple with three children and earnings at the estimated 2013 federal poverty line would lose $1,934 — nearly 7% of their income — due to the combined changes in the EITC and the CTC.

A single mother with two children and a full-time minimum wage job would get $1,552 less if the Child Tax Credit reverts to its pre-2009 threshold. That’s more than five weeks of her pay.

Additional Losses

The EITC estimates reflect only losses directly due to changes in the federal tax code.

Twenty-three states and the District have their own EITCs — virtually all a percent of what their residents can claim on their federal returns. All but three of these are fully refundable — just like the federal EITC.

So many families who lose all or some portion of their federal EITC would lose out on their state taxes too. Still more losses in a couple of local jurisdictions because they’ve got EITCs too.

* Before the Recovery Act, the threshold was linked to a cost-of-living index, like many other key parts of the income tax code. CTJ says the threshold would be $13,300 next year if Congress doesn’t extend the refundable Child Tax Credit as-is.