The Real Numbers: Half of America in Poverty -- and It's Creeping toward 75%

[bhikkhu]

67. It is bad, but that's a misreading of the data

Where it say "the average household in the bottom 50% brings in about $18,000 per year. That's less than the poverty line..." that doesn't mean that the bottom half, or half of households, are living in poverty. It means that half of the lower half might be living in poverty, but in any case that's a sloppy way to use the data.

If you look at an actual graph of income distribution here:



Each quintile is 20% of the population. You can see that only the bottom quintile was solidly "poor", while the mean (the average) of the next quintile was higher than poverty level. Which means that some, but probably not most, of the next 20% live in poverty.

Which should be interpreted to say, correctly, that about 30% of US household live in poverty.

That would be somewhat worse, for whatever reason, than this would indicate, but at least in the ballpark:



I know its nitpicking, but I also know I'm going to hear the same sloppy misinterpretation from RW types for weeks, and I will correct them as well.