Key Data Likely Absent or Obscured, U.S. Census Income and Poverty Release

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Mon Aug-29-05 08:18 PM
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Key Data Likely Absent or Obscured, U.S. Census Income and Poverty Release

http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=52231

Poverty is Rising - Someone Tell Census, Congress; Key Data Likely Absent or Obscured in U.S. Census Income and Poverty Release -- Cuts to Census Budget Hinders Data Collection While Tens of Millions of Children Live in Poverty

8/29/2005 4:09:00 PM

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To: National Desk

Contact: Jennifer Fuson, 202-339-9350 or jfuson@communitychange.org, Germonique Jones, 202-339-9331 or gjones@communitychange.org, both of the Center for Community Change

WASHINGTON, Aug. 29 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Tomorrow's release of the 2004 income and poverty data by the U.S. Census will likely continue efforts by the Administration and Congress to mask and ignore the problem of poverty in the United States. The bottom line-poverty and extreme poverty have increased substantially during the past three years, while social programs that help low-income Americans have been cut or eliminated by Congress and the Bush Administration.

"The effort by the Administration to understate the extent of economic hardship in the U.S. serves their broader and extremely troubling agenda to reduce or eliminate social programs that play a positive role for low-income Americans, while pursuing egregious tax cuts for the wealthy," said Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center for Community Change.

The evidence:

-- More people live in poverty! In 2003, there were 35.9 million people living in poverty-up from 32.9 million Americans in 2001. The numbers living in extreme poverty, below 50 percent of the poverty income level, hit 15.3 million in 2003, steadily increasing during the Bush Administration. We expect tomorrow's numbers to show a similar trend.

-- More children living in poverty! By the Census' own admission, 12.9 million children lived in poverty in 2003, more than 18-64 year olds and more than that of seniors 65 years and older. http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/poverty03/pov03hi.html

-- Less information is better! In July, the Senate Appropriations Committee sent to the Senate floor a bill with inadequate funding to continue the Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS). They also recommended slashing the sample size used for the national poverty data, the Current Population Survey (CPS).

The ACS is a survey that provides income, poverty, housing quality, and other important data for states. Without these data, detailed information on income and poverty by state will only be available every ten years-severely limiting the ability to plan for funding for critical social programs like TANF, food stamps, Medicaid, housing assistance, child care subsidies and energy assistance. This will not only effect federal funding levels, but state and local community planning that depend on this data.

-- Less help is available! $35 billion dollars in cuts have been mandated from low-income programs like Medicaid, food stamps, and student loans in the FY 2006 budget that Congress will consider in September. Another "reconciliation" bill to be considered in September includes more than $100 billion in new tax cuts for the wealthy.

-- Less public attention is better! For the second year in a row, the U.S. Census Bureau has released the poverty data in August-notoriously the slowest time of the year in Washington, D.C.-when Congress, President Bush, and many reporters are on summer vacation.

"With the release of the poverty numbers tomorrow, we can expect the trend to bury data to continue that might challenge overly optimistic policy statements by this Administration. Rarely has this behavior to mask the poverty problem in this country been so blatant," says Bhargava. "What America does not need is political leaders who pretend that families are not struggling everyday to sustain a dignified standard of living, because their struggles are very real for too many Americans."

------ The Center for Community Change is a social and economic justice non profit that works to unite urban and rural low income grassroots groups to become a national force for social change.

http://www.usnewswire.com/