Download as a PDF - CiteSeerX

12 Hardships in America
TABLE 2 Numbers of families and persons below
family budgets and poverty level
Number below (000’s)
Family budget
Poverty line
Families 4,229 1,485
Persons 14,154 4,926
White 7,011 2,042
African American 2,758 1,184
Hispanic 3,730 1,456
Other 655 244
Adults 6,686 2,175
Children 7,468 2,751
White 3,576 1,073
African American 1,580 729
Hispanic 1,958 809
Other 354 140
Source: Authors’ calculations from the pooled 1997-99 March CPS.
Note: Sample is families with positive earnings, one to two parents, and one to three
children under the age of 12.
most likely to be struggling to make ends meet. However, families not typically
thought of as the most needy, such as two-parent families, white families, families
with a high-school-educated worker, families with a full-time worker, and
families headed by workers age 30 and over are also struggling to get by.
Racial minorities face the greatest struggles making ends meet. As Table 3
shows, over 50% of black and Hispanic families and 28.5% of families in other
racial categories (American Indians, Aleut Eskimos, Asians, Pacific Islanders,
and others “unspecified”) fall below family budget levels, compared to 20.3%
of white families. However, as Table 4 shows, white families make up the
majority (50.5%) of families that fall below family budget levels. Also, a greater
share of white families fall below family budget levels than fall below poverty
(50.5% vs. 43.6%). Thus, while racial minorities tend to dominate the ranks of
the poor, a substantial portion of the near-poor are white families.
Since family income usually rises with the education level of the family
head, families headed by a householder with lower levels of education are
predictably more likely to fall below basic family budgets (Table 3). Families
headed by a worker with less than a high school education are the most likely to
fall below family budget levels (68.6%). However, as Table 4 shows, over threefourths
of families who fall below family budget levels are headed by a worker
with at least a high school education, indicating that problems with meeting
basic needs are not concentrated among families with the least-educated workers.