Quote:The U.S. saw a sharp rise in the government’s supplemental poverty rate and a fall in real incomes for Americans in 2022, with the rate for children more than doubling, according to census data released Tuesday.

The government’s Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), which calculates poverty by including the impact of government programs, geographic variation in housing expenses, taxes and medical expenses, increased for children from 5.2% in 2021 to 12.4% in 2022, while overall poverty increased by 4.6 points to 12.4% during President Joe Biden’s second year in office, according to a release from the U.S. Census Bureau. Biden blamed the rise in child poverty seen under his tenure on the lapse of the expanded Child Tax Credit, according to a Friday statement from the White House.


“Higher frequency data released since 2022 strongly suggest that some of the 2022 income dynamics that Census is expected to report on Tuesday have improved substantially in 2023, as employment and labor supply have continued to reach new highs, inflation has fallen substantially, and real earnings have grown,” the White House said Friday before the data had been released. “On the other hand, the increase in poverty is likely to persist absent congressional action to restore the enhanced Child Tax Credit (CTC), as President Biden has proposed.”


The official poverty rate, which measures how many Americans fall below a certain income threshold, remained the same at 11.5% for 2022, according to the census data. The increase in the SPM was the first since the metric was introduced in 2010.


The median for real household income fell 2.3% in that same time frame, from $76,330 to $74,580, following a period of high inflation that degraded real wages, according to the census data.


The loss in real wages from the year accompanies persistently high inflation, which peaked at 9.1% in June 2022. Inflation has since come down but still remains elevated above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target, at 3.2%.


The rise in poverty comes as debt reached an all-time high in the second quarter of 2023 at $17.06 trillion, with $1 trillion of that being credit card debt.

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