As you can see, this comes via the blog at Mint.com, the personal finance website, and features a county-by-county map of the U.S. showing the percentages of populations living below the federal poverty threshold. Here’s the link to the interactive map itself, which features state-by-state breakdowns (I was kind of hoping for the drill-down to be county-by-county, too, but what can you expect?).
Personally, I was unsurprised to see where the “poverty belt” sits, since we’ve seen that same geographic dispersal before in maps that track where slavery was most prominent and where blacks make up the majority of the population. I was a bit surprised to see that the poorest county in the six New England states is York County, Maine, since I tend to associate that part of Maine with wealthy refugees from Massachusetts and places like Kennebunkport, but I guess that once you get away from the Bush family compound the average income must drop like a rock. Also, what’s up with South Dakota? Are those Native-American reservations, perchance?
If you click on that one button on the interactive map, it will tell you what the poverty thresholds are per household size, but I’ll tell you that the poverty line for a family of four is $22,205. One of the nastiest secrets about American poverty is that every entity that has a horse in the race is fully committed to not coming up with an accurate or reasonable assessment of the threshold of poverty and works from a formula originally conceived in 1965 and which are only adjusted for CPI (consumer price index), not any real-world assessment of the cost of living, nor any regional adjustments. Because if they actually did that, the already appalling figure of 14.3% of the American population living in poverty would skyrocket to reflect the reality of economic conditions in this country. Just like people who stop collecting unemployment no longer figure into the count of the unemployed, there is waaaaaaaay more actual poverty than officially-designated poverty, and there isn’t a politician or CEO around who wants to own that.
So have a look at this map and remember that it only BEGINS to tell you the story of how we are turning into a third-world nation with every passing day.
UPDATE 11/26/10 — A reader points out that since this post originally appeared, Mint has changed/fixed the map and York County no longer shows up as the poorest in New England. That dubious distinction belongs a lot less surprisingly to Washington County.
