Poverty in Michigan has increased a staggering 66 percent since 2001 according to the US Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS) released in September. This is the largest increase in poverty in any state in the country. Three-fourths of this rise occurred before the recession began in 2008.
Michigan’s poverty rate continued to rise sharply through 2011, to 17.5 percent up from 16.8 percent just a year earlier, and well above the national average of fifteen percent. The climb in the poverty rate only partially measures growing social distress because state and federal governments are at the same time cutting safety net programs once available to the most economically vulnerable populations.
Almost 1 in 4 children in Michigan lives in poverty. Child poverty rose to 24.4 percent in 2011, up from 23.1 percent in 2010 and 14.2 percent level in 2001. Michigan is in the worst third of the nation for child poverty.
Thirteen other states, all in the US south or southwest and the District of Columbia, had child poverty rates even higher. Mississippi continues to have the highest child poverty rate in the nation at 32 percent. North Carolina recorded 25.6 percent, and West Virginia had 25.8 percent.
The city of Detroit has a child poverty rate of 57.3 percent. Partly this reflects the abandonment of the older, disabled and otherwise vulnerable population that makes up a growing part of the population. The proportion grew when factories closed and families left the city over the past decades.
Household poverty in Detroit is now 41 percent. Partly this is a symptom of decades of lost jobs in the industrial state and across the Midwest as a whole. Nine other Michigan cities with populations over 65,000 saw increases in poverty. A decline in median income and growing income inequality were exacerbated by the onset of the recession in 2008.
The state’s median household income fell to $45,981 in 2011, a nearly 20 percent drop in inflation-adjusted dollars—that is, a $7,000 decline over the decade. Median income fell 1.5 percent between 2010 and 2011 alone.
Michigan lost over 400,000 manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2010. The continuing decline in median income attests to the fact that most of the jobs opening up in the past few years have been in traditionally low-paying sectors such as retail.
via www.wsws.org
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