Income inequality in the U.S. increased last year for the first time in more than a decade, but childhood poverty was cut almost in half due to expansion of the federal government's child tax credit and stimulus payments made in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to new survey results released Tuesday by the U.S. Census Bureau.
However, people in households headed by someone age 65 or older, those with only some college education and households where family members didn't live together saw dips in their income from 2020 to 2021. Among the reasons was that the fixed income that many seniors are on didn't keep pace with rising inflation in 2021, and many of the “nonfamily” households were headed by women whose income lagged those headed by men.
The time period in the latest Current Population Survey covered the third round of pandemic-related stimulus payments and expansions to the Child Tax Credit, Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child and Dependent Care Credit. The time period in the survey also saw a 4.7% increase in consumer prices, the largest annual increase in the cost-of-living adjustment since 1990.
The expansion of the Child Tax Credit helped reduce childhood poverty, as measured by the bureau's Supplemental Poverty Measure, from 9.7% in 2020 to 5.2% last year. It is the lowest since the new measure was implemented in 2009.
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