8 million Americans being considered newly poor

A new poverty estimate seeking to analyze the nationwide impact of government relief measures which expired just at the end of last month has found that the latter half of 2020 marked the sharpest rise in the US poverty rate since the 1960s. The study released Monday and presented in Bloomberg finds that the poverty rate increased by 2.4% during the second half of 2020, following last spring and early summer COVID-19 rolling lockdowns in various parts of the country. This amounts to an additional 8 million Americans being considered newly poor, nearly double the highest annual increase in poverty in over a half-century. The study authors – economists Bruce Meyer of the University of Chicago, and James Sullivan of the University of Notre Dame – further found that Black Americans were among the hardest hit, and more that twice as likely to fall below the poverty line as White Americans.…