By Danilo Trisi and Matt Saenz, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, January 28, 2021
Our success as a nation depends on whether all people, regardless of race or ethnicity, have the opportunity to thrive. Economic security programs such as Social Security, food assistance, tax credits, and housing assistance can help provide opportunity by ameliorating short-term poverty and hardship and, by doing so, improving children’s long-term outcomes. Over the last half-century, these assistance programs have reduced poverty for millions of people — including children, who are highly susceptible to poverty’s ill effects.
At the same time, barriers to opportunity, including discrimination and disparities in access to employment, education, and health care, remain enormous and keep poverty rates much higher for some racial and ethnic groups than others. While government programs have done much to narrow these disparities in poverty, further progress will require stronger government efforts to reduce poverty and discrimination and build opportunity for all.
Between 1970 and 2017 the poverty rate fell for all groups, but it fell even more for Black and Latino people: by 25 and 27 percentage points, respectively, compared to 8 percentage points for white non-Latino people, we calculate.[1] Even with this reduction, poverty rates for Black and Latino people remained far above the white poverty rate. Our series begins in 1970, the first year that data on Latino ethnicity are available, and ends in 2017, the latest year that data on underreporting of key government benefits are available. (Rather than the official poverty measure, this report uses a variant of the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which among other advantages incorporates the value of non-cash and tax-based benefits, as we detail below.)
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