Rural incomes are up and the rural poverty rate is down, dropping twice as fast as the U.S. average, said the Census Bureau on Wednesday. In its annual report on income and poverty, Census said that the rural poverty rate fell by 1 percentage point during 2017, compared to a 0.4-point decline nationwide. However, the rural poverty rate of 14.8 percent was, as usual, higher than the U.S. rate, which was 12.3 percent.
The rural poverty rate is routinely 2 to 3 percentage points higher than the U.S. rate. Wages tend to be lower in rural America, and residents are a bit older, with less earning power, than the population overall. The median rural household income of $47,563 in 2017 was slightly more than three-fourths of the U.S. average. Higher household incomes, up by 1.7 percent, helped reduce the rural poverty rate, according to Census data.
The agency also pared its estimate of the rural population by 1.4 percent, to 43 million, at the same time that the overall U.S. population grew by nearly 1 percent, to about 322 million. As urban areas expand, less land and fewer people remain outside of metropolitan areas and can be considered rural.
Roughly 1 in 7 Americans live in rural America. The 1920 Census was the first to show more Americans living in towns than in the country.
Despite the improvement nationwide, 40 million people still live in poverty, said the anti-hunger Food Research and Action Group. “Federal and state governments need to do more to reduce poverty and hunger,” said FRAC chief Jim Weill. “One important step that Congress can take now is to pass a farm bill that protects and strengthens SNAP.”
Blue-collar jobs, such as mining, construction, and manufacturing, are growing at their fastest rate in decades, according to a Washington Post analysis. “Job gains in smaller towns and rural areas accelerated last year, and continued to build in early 2018,” it said, with employment growing faster in rural areas than in cities. Mark Munro of the Brookings Institution, a think tank, said, “Small towns and rural America are finally winning a little.”
The Census Bureau’s “supplemental poverty measure,” which takes into account government assistance to low-income people, showed that in 2017, SNAP lifted 3.4 million people out of poverty, school lunches boosted 1.2 million people out of poverty, and WIC carried 279,000 people out of poverty, said FRAC. The think tank Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said that President Trump had “called for deep cuts in several of the programs that, the data show, reduce poverty.”
When the supplemental measure is used, the U.S. poverty rate is 13.9 percent, little changed from 2016, said the Census Bureau.
A week ago, the USDA said the food insecurity rate had dropped to 11.8 percent of U.S. households, down from 12.3 percent in 2016. The rate peaked at 14.9 percent in 2011 during the slow recovery from the recession. For the annual report, the USDA defines food-insecure households as those that “had difficulty at some time during the year providing enough food for all their members due to a lack of resources.”