As you have probably heard, the Census Bureau released 2009 data yesterday on a wide range of issues, including income, poverty and health insurance. Wisconsin’s child poverty rate jumped from 13.4% in 2008 to 16.7% in 2009 – catching up a bit to the national rate, which increased to 20.0% last year. About 214,000 Wisconsin children lived in poverty in 2009, 42,000 more than the previous year.

There has been some good coverage of the new data in the media but most of that coverage has missed the alarming racial and ethnic disparities revealed by the new data. For example, median income among Black households in the state was $25,807 in 2009, less than half that of White or Asian households. The Black child poverty rate in Wisconsin (48% in 2009) was more than four times the rate for White children and three times that of Asian children.Two charts in the press release we issued Tuesday highlight those disparities. As the first chart illustrates, median income among Black households in the state was $25,807 in 2009, less than half that of White or Asian households.  The second chart shows that children in Hispanic and Latino households were almost three times more likely to live in poverty than White children. 

The new data is from the American Community Survey (ACS), which is based on a survey of about 30 times more people than the Census Bureau’s annual Current Population Survey (CPS), released two weeks ago. The small CPS survey size precludes any analysis of local data and makes it necessary to average together two years of state-level data, to increase the reliability of the results. But the far larger ACS sample provides survey results for communities with a population of at least 65,000, including data for 23 Wisconsin counties. Our press release contains key parts of the income, poverty and health insurance data for those 23 counties.

There’s a wealth of other information in the ACS data, and we’ll report on more of it in the coming days.

Jon Peacock
WCCF research director