LegiStorm

Summary:

The poverty rate among Americans aged 65 and older has declined by almost 70% in the past five decades. In 2017, approximately 9.2% of Americans aged 65 and older had income below the poverty thresholds. However, the number of aged poor has increased since the mid-1970s as the total number of elderly has grown. In 2017, 4.7 million people aged 65 and older lived in poverty. The poverty rate for Americans aged 65 and older historically was higher than the rates for younger groups, but the aged have experienced lower poverty rates than children under age 18 since 1974 and lower rates than adults aged 18 to 64 since the early 1990s. In 2017, the 9.2% poverty rate among Americans aged 65 and older was lower than the 11.2% poverty rate among adults aged 18 to 64 and the 17.5% poverty rate among children under 18 years old. Although the poverty rate has generally declined for older Americans in most demographic groups, certain aged people still live in poverty. For example, People aged 80 and older have a higher poverty rate than other elderly Americans. In 2017, approximately 11.6% of people aged 80 and older lived in poverty, compared with poverty rates of 9.3% among individuals aged 75-79, 8.6% among those aged 70-74, and 7.9% among those aged 65-69. Women aged 80 and older had the highest poverty rate among elderly women and men in all age groups, at 13.5% in 2017 for women aged 80 and older, and 18.6% for those living alone. Americans aged 65 and older who were married and living together with spouses at the time of the survey generally had a lower poverty rate than those who were not married. Among women aged 65 and older, about 4.3% of married women had total incomes below the official poverty threshold in 2017, compared with 13.9% of widows, 15.8% of divorced women, and 21.5% of never-married women. Among individuals aged 65 and older, poverty rates were also high among never-married men, at 22.5% in 2017. Poverty rates vary by race and Hispanic origin. Hispanic origin is distinct from race, and people may identify with one or more races. From 1975 to 2017, the poverty rate for Americans aged 65 and older has decreased for those identifying as non-Hispanic white alone, black alone, and Hispanic. In 2017, the poverty rate was lowest among the non-Hispanic white population (5.8% for men and 8.0% for women) and highest among those identifying as black or African American (16.1% for men and 21.5% for women). The official poverty measure is defined using cash income only, before taxes, and was computed based on food consumption in 1955 and food costs in 1961, indexed to inflation. That definition prevents the official measure from gauging the effects of noncash benefits, taxes, or tax credits on the low-income population, and it does not consider how certain other costs, such as housing or medical expenses, might affect them as well. After decades of research, the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) was developed to address some of the official poverty measure's limitations. The SPM poverty rate for the aged population is higher than the official poverty rate (14.1% compared with 9.2% in 2017). This higher poverty rate results largely from higher medical out-of-pocket costs among the aged. Social Security and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) are the main federally funded programs that provide cash benefits to the aged poor; they accounted for almost 90% of total money income received by Americans aged 65 and older whose incomes were below the poverty thresholds in 2017. The federal government also provides certain noncash benefits to help the elderly poor, such as housing subsidies and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The SPM poverty rate among individuals aged 65 and older would increase by more than 34 percentage points if Social Security benefits were excluded from their income resources, holding other economic behaviors constant. Among the other resources, eliminating SSI, housing subsidies, or SNAP from income would each increase the SPM poverty rate by about one percentage point.