A record- low share of Americans were living in poverty before the pandemic hit

A record- low share of Americans were living in poverty, incomes were climbing and health insurance coverage was little changed in 2019, a government report released Tuesday showed — although the circumstances of many have deteriorated as pandemic lockdowns and industry disruptions have thrown millions out of work.

The share of Americans living in poverty fell to 10.5% in 2019, the Census Bureau reported, down 1.3 percentage points from 2018. That rate is the lowest since estimates were first published in 1959.

Household incomes increased to their highest level on record dating to 1967, at $ 68,700 in inflationadjusted terms. That change came as individual workers saw their earnings climb and as the total number of people working increased.

Methodology changes made after 2013 make comparing data across time tricky. But even adjusting for those differences, the 2019 income figures appeared to be the highest on record, based on Census Bureau estimates.

The data may also have been somewhat skewed by the pandemic. Interviews for this year’s income and poverty report were disrupted by the virus, the Census Bureau said. Some economists warned that the disruptions could have made the data look too rosy: The people who responded to surveys were more likely to have high education and income levels. Analysts at the Census Bureau estimated that poverty would have been slightly higher, at 11.1%, without the resulting data quirks.

“It doesn’t change the overall picture — we had a tight labor market that was pulling people in and reducing poverty,” said Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute. But it underscores that “there was still a lot of room for improvement.”

Despite the record- long expansion, about 26 million Americans — 8% of the population — still lacked health coverage for all of 2019. That was a slight decrease from the 27.5 million who were not covered in 2018.

While that change is small, it is notable because 2019 was the first year in which the Affordable Care Act’s mandate to purchase coverage was no longer in effect.

A second health insurance survey, which asks Americans if they had coverage at the moment they were interviewed, did show a slight increase in the uninsured rate, from 8.9% in 2018 to 9.2% in 2019.

The report highlights how strong the job market and economy were before the pandemic, following a record- long expansion that began in 2009. Yet it underscores how, despite those gains, many families remained vulnerable to such a major shock.

Unemployment was hovering at around 3.5% before the crisis took hold, the lowest in 50 years, and wages were steadily rising. Yet at the end of 2019, 3 in 10 adults said they could not cover three months’ worth of expenses with savings or borrowing in the case of a job loss, according to a Federal Reserve survey.

Minority groups experienced bigger declines in poverty in 2019, the census report showed, but also have much higher poverty rates. The poverty rate for whites dropped 1 percentage point to 9.1%; for Asians, it was down 2.8 percentage points to 7.3%. Black poverty dropped 2 points to 18.8%, and Hispanic poverty decreased by 1.8 percentage points to 15.7%.

“The very groups who need a stronger economy to pull them back are the ones getting disproportionately hit by the downturn we’re in now,” Shierholz said.

The figures suggest that many families were still on edge as state and local lockdowns prompted the sharpest job losses on record, pushing the unemployment rate up to 14.7% in April. While unemployment has declined to 8.4% as employers call back their temporarily furloughed workers, that left about 10 million fewer people employed in August than in February.

Members of minority groups have been hard- hit by those job losses, as have workers with lower education levels. Economists warn that many layoffs in the service sector could turn permanent as casinos, concert venues and hotels struggle to fully reopen as the coronavirus continues to spread.

But it is true that a record- long expansion and strong labor market were helping workers to make meaningful gains before the pandemic.

Median incomes for white, Black, Asian and Hispanic households all increased in 2019, adjusting for inflation, the census report released Tuesday showed.

Even as incomes rose, census officials said that the measure of income inequality was statistically unchanged last year. That suggests that despite higher levels of employment and pay, different policy measures would need to be used to narrow the gap between the rich and poor.