Matthew Phulips

Yesterday we learned that 15.1% of Americans were living in poverty in 2010, the highest level since 1993, and up nearly 1 percentage point from 2009, when it was 14.3%. That data is based on an income measurement which shows that in 2010, 46.2 million Americans were living below the poverty line, defined as $22,314 a year for a family of four.

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Income and consumption measures of the poverty gap have generally moved in opposite directions in the last two decades, with income based poverty gaps rising, but consumption based poverty gaps falling.

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Compared to the income poor, the consumption poor are less educated, less likely to own a home, more likely to live in married parent families, and much less likely to be single individuals or elderly. The fraction of the consumption poor living in married parent families is 80% higher than the fraction of the income poor living in such families in recent years.