September 13, 2016

Chart of the Day #2: Poverty Rates Decline Sharply in 2015

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The latest estimate of poverty from the Census Bureau is similar to their estimate of income: the good news is that poverty dropped substantially in 2015, but the bad news is that we still have a ways to go before we reach pre-recession levels. Among working-age adults, poverty levels fell from 13.5 percent to 12.4 percent, a decline of nearly a tenth. However, the poverty rate among working-age adults was around 10-11 percent from 1990-2007:

The report claims that new estimates of poverty using the SPM, which should be more accurate than the old measure, are also available, but the URLs they provide lead nowhere. I guess they’re a little behind. Presumably this stuff will be available shortly.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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