One in three experienced poverty [View all]

[SoCalDem]

http://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/seesaw-economy-nearly-one-three-dipped-poverty-n17111

In America’s new normal, plenty of Americans will tumble into poverty at some point – but few will be stuck there forever. Nearly one in three Americans experienced a stint of poverty between 2009 and 2011, a new Census Bureau report finds, but only a fraction of those people were stuck below the poverty line for the entire three-year period. “There’s a lot of movement in and out of poverty,” said Ann Stevens, director of the Center for Poverty Research at UC Davis.

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But it’s also because of a longer-running trend toward lower skilled, low-paying jobs. Permanent, good paying jobs are largely going to the highly skilled and highly educated, while many of the rest are living on a knife-edge of economic ruin, where even living paycheck to paycheck seems like a luxury.



The 22-year-old from Wellsville, N.Y., makes $5 an hour plus tips at her part-time job as a server at a pizza chain. She rarely knows how many hours she’ll be working, or how much money her customers will leave on the table.
That means she also rarely knows whether she’ll make enough to pay the rent or put food on her own table. “It’s not even month to month. It’s week to week or night to night,” she said.

The Census Bureau report found that 31.6 percent of Americans were in poverty for least two months between 2009 and 2011, compared to 27.1 percent of Americans between 2005 and 2007. The recession ran from late 2007 to mid-2009. Those who fell below the poverty line also stayed there longer. The median length a person spent below the poverty line was 6.6 months between 2009 and 2011, as compared to 5.7 months between 2005 and 2007.

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