[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: More Americans Were Uninsured and Poor in 2003, Census Finds

Fri Aug 27 12:20:43 PDT 2004

The article below from NYTimes.com 
has been sent to you by michael at intrafi.com.

/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight ------------\

 I HEART HUCKABEES - OPENING IN SELECT CITIES OCTOBER 1

 From David O. Russell, writer and director of THREE KINGS
 and FLIRTING WITH DISASTER comes an existential comedy
 starring Dustin Hoffman, Isabelle Hupert, Jude Law, Jason
 Schwartzman, Lily Tomlin, Mark Wahlberg and Naomi Watts.
 Watch the trailer now at:

 http://www.foxsearchlight.com/huckabees/index_nyt.html

\----------------------------------------------------------/

More Americans Were Uninsured and Poor in 2003, Census Finds

August 27, 2004
 By DAVID LEONHARDT 

WASHINGTON, Aug. 26 - The ranks of the poor and those
without health insurance grew in 2003 for the third
straight year, the government reported on Thursday, in a
sign of the lingering pain being caused by a long slump in
the job markets. 

Those trends, spelled out by the United States Census
Bureau, signaled a clear shift in the way the 2001
recession and its aftermath have spread across the country.
The economy's troubles, which first affected high-income
families even more than the middle class and poor, have
recently hurt families at the bottom and in the middle
significantly more than those at the top. 

Median household income rose at about the same rate as
inflation last year after three years of relative declines,
according to the report. But the disparity in incomes
between the rich and poor grew after having fallen in 2002.
Pay did not keep pace with inflation in the South, already
the nation's poorest region, in cities, or among
immigrants. And the wage gap between men and women widened
for the first time in four years. 

Poverty rose most sharply among single-parent families last
year. Health-insurance coverage fell only for families with
annual income of less than $75,000. [Page C1.] 

On the campaign trail, Mr. Bush has been saying the country
has overcome the recession and a stock market decline in
part because of his tax cuts. Democrats Thursday accused
the Bush administration of trying to the bury the new
numbers by releasing them all at once in late August,
rather than reporting the poverty and health-insurance data
on separate days in September, as they had in recent years.

"They're trying to lump, dump and run," Representative
Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, said. 

Census officials said that politics played no role in the
change and that the two sets of data had also been released
simultaneously in the mid-1990's. The bureau published the
numbers in August to coincide with the release of local
economic numbers it compiles, officials said. 

"Normally we're not criticized for bringing out data
earlier," Charles Louis Kincannon, the director of the
Census Bureau, said. 

The national poverty rate rose to 12.5 percent last year,
from 12.1 percent in 2002. After dropping rapidly in a long
economic boom and a government war on poverty in the
1960's, from more than 22 percent in 1960, the rate has
changed relatively little over the last four decades. It
was slightly higher in 2003 than in 1969. A family of two
adults and two children with an income of less than $18,660
was considered poor last year. 

"We have had a generation with basically no progress
against poverty," said Sheldon Danziger, a professor of
public policy at the University of Michigan. "The economic
growth is not trickling down to the poor." 

Depending on their political beliefs, economists tend to
place varying portions of blame for this on a rise in
single-parent families, a withering of good jobs for people
without college degrees and a shift away from anti-poverty
programs by the federal government. 

The number of uninsured Americans rose last year largely
because fewer companies were providing health benefits to
their workers than in the past, the Census Bureau reported.
Almost 16 percent of people did not have health insurance
last year, up from 14.2 percent in 2000. 

Median household income declined slightly last year, by $63
to $43,318, but census officials said the change was not
statistically significant. Since peaking in 1999 at the
equivalent of $44,922 in 2003 with inflation taken into
account, median household income has fallen more than
$1,600, or 3.6 percent, though it remained higher last year
than at any point before the late 1990's. The candidates
for president offered sharply different views of the
economy on Thursday. Senator John Kerry, the Democratic
presidential nominee, argued that the report offered new
proof that the Bush administration had put the interests of
wealthy families ahead those of most Americans. 

"The census figures are facts," Mr. Kerry said, while
campaigning at Anoka Technical College in a suburb of
Minneapolis. "They're not political diatribe. They're
facts, statistics, and they tell a story when you add them
all up." 

Mr. Bush, in Farmington, N.M., said: "Because we acted, our
economy since last summer has grown at a rate as fast as
any in nearly 20 years. Since last August, we've added
about 1.5 million new jobs.'' 

Terry Holt, a spokesman for President's Bush campaign, said
that the census numbers were outdated because they covered
only 2003. "Absent from these numbers is the strong
economic growth we've seen in the last 11 months," Mr. Holt
said. 

Mr. Bush has helped the economy recover from recession by
cutting taxes, Mr. Holt added, and has attacked poverty by
signing a tax cut that eliminated income taxes for five
million low-income people. 

Unlike most economic downturns, the one that began in early
2001 was something of an equal-opportunity recession,
hurting high-income and low-income families alike. The
bursting of the stock market bubble, the collapse of many
technology ventures and the decline of the manufacturing
sector all led to the elimination of many good-paying jobs.

But as the economy continues its uneven recovery, growing
but adding many fewer jobs than is typical, families in the
lower part of the spectrum have begun to lose ground again,
as they did in much of the 1970's, 80's and 90's. 

Pay fell last year for households in rural areas and in
cities, where income is less than the national average, by
a greater percentage than it did for those in suburbs, the
bureau said. After reaching an all-time high in 2002, the
earnings of full-time female workers relative to their male
counterparts fell slightly last year, to 75.5 percent.
Income also dropped more for Hispanics than for whites,
though it remained essentially unchanged for black
households. 

Over all, the highest-earning fifth of households took home
49.8 percent of the nation's income last year, up from the
49.7 percent in 2002 and 44.7 percent in 1983. Those
figures exaggerate income inequality somewhat, however,
because they do not include taxes and because wealthy
households are larger on average than poor ones. 

"There's a very large transfer of resources to poor people
that is not captured in these poverty numbers,'' said
Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the Heritage
Foundation, a research group. Whatever the true level of
inequality, though, it grew last year, with the greatest
increases in poverty coming among some of the nation's
poorest groups. The poverty rate among households headed by
a single woman rose to 28 percent, from 26.5 percent in
2002. 

Of families with children under 6, 19.8 percent, or 4.6
million, were considered poor last year, up from 18.5
percent in the previous year. 

Whites Aren't Texas Majority 

HOUSTON, Aug. 26 (AP) -
Non-Hispanic whites are no longer the majority in Texas for
the first time since the 1800's, according to a Census
Bureau survey. 

The survey said whites stopped being the majority as of
last year. Most of Texas' population expansion since 2000
has come from births and international immigration, both
sources of predominantly Hispanic growth. 

Estimates show that the state was 49.5 percent white in
2003, down 1.5 percentage points from 2002 but still a
large plurality. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/27/national/27census.html?ex=1094634443&ei=1&en=5666b4eb134b617c

---------------------------------

Get Home Delivery of The New York Times Newspaper. Imagine
reading The New York Times any time & anywhere you like!
Leisurely catch up on events & expand your horizons. Enjoy
now for 50% off Home Delivery! Click here:

http://homedelivery.nytimes.com/HDS/SubscriptionT1.do?mode=SubscriptionT1&ExternalMediaCode=W24AF

HOW TO ADVERTISE
---------------------------------
For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters 
or other creative advertising opportunities with The 
New York Times on the Web, please contact
onlinesales at nytimes.com or visit our online media 
kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo

For general information about NYTimes.com, write to 
help at nytimes.com.  

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company