I am a Texas native covering breaking news out of New York City. Previously, I was an editorial assistant at the Forbes London bureau.
Amid the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and an economic recession, government aid in the form of stimulus checks and boosted unemployment payouts helped push the supplemental U.S. poverty rateStimulus checks issued last year helped lift millions of Americans out of poverty, the U.S. CensusThe figure marks a decline of 2.6 percentage points compared to the 11.8% supplemental poverty reported in 2019, the Census Bureau said Tuesday.
The supplemental poverty rate includes government benefits, like Social Security, unemployment checks and stimulus payments, unlike the official poverty rate, which excludes government aid. The official poverty rate jumped by one percentage point to reach 11.4% in 2020, the Census Bureau said, representing an additional 3.3 million people living in poverty compared to 2019, the first increase in poverty after five years of declining rates.
Last year marked the first time in the Census Bureau’s history that the official poverty rate surpassed the supplemental poverty rate, the bureau said Tuesday, indicating how important government aid was in preventing impoverishment in 2020. Social Security remains the largest form of government aid, with 26.5 million people being moved out of poverty thanks to the program, but that number was boosted in 2020 thanks to stimulus checks and unemployment, which helped 11.7 million and 5.5 million Americans, respectively, stay above the poverty line.
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