Website Maps 2010 Poverty Rates by Congressional District
The Halfin Ten campaign has released its latest
interactive poverty map to help advocates, elected officials, and
policymakers get a clearer picture of how increasing poverty rates are
affecting constituents.
The online map allows users to view the Census Bureau’s 2010 poverty
data by congressional district, and then breaks it down by gender and
race. Half in Ten also used the data to identify which members of Congress
are failing to adequately represent low-income constituents by voting to
weaken social safety net programs such as Medicaid and seeking to
repeal health care reforms.
Nationally, the latest data from the Census Bureau show that there were 46.2 million people – 15.1 percent of the population – living in poverty in 2010, and there were about 50 million
people without health care coverage. From 2009 to 2010, 2.6 million
more Americans fell into poverty and median incomes declined by 2.3
percent, bringing the poverty rate to the highest it has been since
1993.
“Twenty-five million Americans are in need of full-time work, and
over 100 million Americans are in poverty or scraping by on low
incomes,” noted Half in Ten. “Now is the time to invest in federal
efforts that create jobs and grow the economy—not make draconian cuts to
Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, or other critical safety net
programs. Further cuts means further increases in unemployment and even
more hardship for our nation’s most financially insecure households.”
In the face of an ongoing jobs crisis and rising poverty, The Leadership
Conference, which is a partner in the Half in Ten campaign, is calling
on Congress to support jobs and deficit reduction plans put forward by President Obama that would protect lower- and middle-income Americans and help strengthen the economy.
Half in Ten is a collaborative anti-poverty campaign led by The
Leadership Conference, the Center for American Progress, and the
Coalition on Human Needs dedicated to cutting poverty in half in 10 years.