October 9, 2003

Newsfeed: Greg Duncan

Greg Duncan, Edwina S. Tarry Professor of Education, discusses poverty.

A recent Census report shows that poverty is on the rise, with 1.7 million more U.S. families living below the poverty line in 2002. Greg Duncan says recession is a major culprit.

“It used to be that people thought welfare reform might be an important cause of increased poverty, but for most of the years of welfare reform during the late 1990s, poverty decreased rather than increased. But the past couple of years it started to go back up and this last year it went up quite substantially. It makes for a pretty grim picture for how low-income families are doing these days.”

According to Duncan, the Midwest experienced a significant increase in poverty.

“The increase in poverty and the reduction in average income was larger and more certain for the Midwestern states than was the case in the East or the South or the West. One could imagine that the industrial faltering that has been brought about by the recession hits the Midwestern region especially hard because so much of its economy is based on the basic manufacturing kind of industry.”

Duncan expects Democrats will use the report as ammunition in the next election.

“President Bush has been promising recovery and promising that tax cuts are the road to improvement. He was unfortunate in inheriting an economic situation that had been booming and was starting to turn. The Democrats will certainly try to argue that his economic policies have made things worse rather than made things better.”

Duncan says the only positive findings of the report are in the lack of continued negative results.

“Things like inequality didn’t drop, but it didn’t increase. There had been quite a number of years during the ’80s and ’90s when the gap between the rich and the poor was increasing very steadily, and that has leveled off now. There are some regions of the country and some groups in the population that didn’t experience an increase in poverty or didn’t experience a drop in family income, but there’s no group that did consistently better in 2002 than was the case in 2001.”

—Samira Puskar

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