New Delhi: The image that most of the world, especially the Global South, has of the US is as one of the most prosperous and developed countries in the world. While this is true for a large part of America, many are unaware of a large portion of the poor who also make up a huge part of the American public.

Princeton professor Matthew Desmond’s bestseller, ‘Poverty, by America’ explores just this. Desmond asks the question, why do so many Americans live in poverty? Is it because a large number of Americans benefit from it?

Desmond shows how the country’s employers, financial institutions, and landlords extract money from low-income families while rich families hoard opportunity for themselves. This, and other related phenomena, have been persistently occurring in the US for a long time now and there exists ample data to substantiate these claims.

Poverty in America, despite rhetoric and assumptions, has always persisted. In his book, ‘Poverty, by America’, Matthew Desmond writes how the poverty rate in the United States has not improved in half a century, with 11 per cent of the population living in poverty in 2019, compared to 12 per cent in 1970.

The last major census on poverty that was conducted in the US was done in 2022. The findings of the census were nowhere near optimistic. The US Census Bureau data collected national, state and congressional district level findings all in one place.

Poverty rates were measured using ‘official poverty measure’ (OPM) which compares an individual’s or family’s pre tax cash income to a set of thresholds that vary by the size of the family and the ages of family members. In 2022, the poverty rate of the US stood at 11.5 per cent, which is about 37.9 million people.

In the same year, the child poverty rate stood at 15 percent, that is 10.8 million under age 18 who fell below the poverty threshold.

Women’s poverty rate stood at 12.5 per cent, equalling about 20.8 million people below the poverty threshold. Men’s poverty rate was at 10.5 percent, 17.1 million men.

The official poverty rate for Black individuals decreased between 2021 and 2022, with 2022 being the lowest on record.

In terms of measuring poverty rates by state, the highest poverty rates were found in New Mexico (18.2 per cent), Mississippi (17.8 per cent) and Louisiana (16.9 per cent). The lowest poverty rates were found in New Hampshire (7.1 per cent), Utah (7.1 per cent) and Minnesota (7.7 per cent).

A small historical comparison also helps to effectively showcase the problem. The number of people living below the poverty line in the United States in 1990 were 33.59 million people which increased to 39.27 million in 1993. While this did not show much fluctuation for some time, 2010 recorded a high rise with 46.34 million living below poverty line which in 2014 reached its highest recent value of 46.66 million people. At the last count in 2022, the number reached 37.92 million people.

It is thus clear that whatever the US tries to project and however much the world imagines the country to be the epitome of modern capitalist society thriving on unfettered opulence, the numbers show that poverty does exist in the rich land of the US of A.