Nevertheless, 112 million people in the United States were still poor or one emergency away from being poor in 2021, showing how far we have left to go, wrote shaillybarnes of unitethepoor and Kairos_Center.
notably in 2021. Amid a pandemic and widespread economic pain, this is a significant accomplishment.
But unfortunately, official federal poverty figures still conceal the true number of people who are struggling—and underestimate the scale of our responsibility to help them. In fact, the population living between 100 percent and 200 percent of the SPM threshold stayed basically the same between 2020 and 2021: nearly 90 million people, just one emergency away from poverty. If we only looked at the poverty rate, we would have missed them entirely.