From: hooker@aristotle.ils.nwu.edu ( BOB HOOKER)
Newsgroups: alt.rush-limbaugh
Subject: Re: Report: More poor Americans are white
Date: 15 Oct 92 15:20:06 GMT
Organization: ILS

In article <povertyU2O81115ae@clarinet.com>, clarinews@clarinet.com (UPI)
writes:
> 
> 	WASHINGTON (UPI) -- The number of poor Americans since the start of
> the recession has increased at a faster pace among non-Hispanic whites
> than among blacks, a new report released Thursday said.
> 	The report by the Center on Budgets and Policy Priorities also found
> that the poverty rate for non-Hispanic whites in the United States ``far
> exceeds the overall poverty rate in many other Wsetern industrialized
> nations.''
> 	``The rise in poverty during the 1980s was especially marked among
> white children,'' the report said, noting that ``10 percent of white
> children were poor in 1979, a figure that climbed to 11.5 percent by
> 1989 and to 13 percent in 1991. By 1991, the chances a white child would
> live in poverty were nearly one-third greater than they had been 12
> years earlier.''
> 	``Recent changes in the economy, family structure, and government
> policies have hurt not only minorities, but whites as well,'' said Isaac
> Shapiro, the report's author. ``As greater attention is paid to the
> shared consequences of these changes, it may become easier to achieve
> consensus on stronger measures to addres these problems.''
> 	The report said that between 1989 and 1991, some 4.2 million people
> were added to the ranks of the poor, largely because of the recession,
> and that some 51 percent of them were white. Blacks and Hispanics each
> accounted for 22 percent of the increase in the poverty population, the
> report said.
> 	While the number of whites living in poverty increased, the report
> said that whites ``are more than twice as likely as blacks or Hispanics
> to be lifted out of poverty by government safety net programs.''
> 	In 1991, the report said, 32.3 million whites were poor before
> receipt of government benefits was taken into account. Some 14.6 million
> of these people -- 45 percent -- were lifted out of poverty by cash
> benefits.
> 	``By contrast, among blacks, only 20 percent of those who were poor
> were lifted from poverty by cash assistance, while just 19 percent of
> Hispanics were removed from poverty by cash benefits.''
> 	Also, the report found, whites make up nearly half the beneficiaries
> of low-income benefit programs providing cash assistance, food stamps,
> and health care coverage to poor and near-poor people.
> 	About 85 percent of Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries and 77
> percent of unemployment insurance recipients are white, the report said.
> 	Shapiro said, ``Just as the fact that many more whites than
> minorities benefit from safety net programs challenges common
> stereotypes about prpgram recipients, so does the composition of the
> poor contradict popular impressions.''
> 	In 1991, the report said, the number of poor whites exceeded the
> number of poor blacks by 7.5 million -- 17.7 million poor whites, 10.2
> million poor blacks, and 6.3 million poor Hispanics.
> 	For an international comparison, the report relied on the Luxembourg
> Income Study, which compares poverty in the United States with
> conditions in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands,
> Sweden and the United Kingdom.
> 	The Luxembourg study said that in 1986, the latest year the data were
> available, the poverty rate among U.S. whites was 9.1 percent -- higher
> than in every other country in the study and nearly double the 4.8
> percent average poverty rate for those countries.
> 	``The 13.2 percent poverty rate for white children in the United
> States that year was more than double the average child ppverty rate of
> 5.5 percent in the other countries,'' the report said.
> 	Among the report's other findings:
> 	--In 1973, some 20.1 percent of white workers were paid an hourly wage
> too low to lift a family of four to the poverty line with full-time,
> year-round work. By 1991, some 28.1 percent of white workers were paid
> this little.
> 	--In 1979, some 49 percent of whites who were poor before government
> benefits were lifted out of poverty by those benefits. By 1991, only 45
> percent were assisted, largely as a result of program reductions.
> 
> 
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