ABSTRACT
As the first decade of the 2000s drew to a close, the two downturns that bookended the period, both followed by weak recoveries, clearly took their toll on the nation’s less fortunate residents. Over a ten-year span, the country saw the population living below the federal poverty line grow by 12.3 million, driving the total number of Americans in poverty to a historic high of 46.2 million in 2010. By the end of the decade, over 15 percent of the nation’s population lived below the federal poverty line—$22,314 for a family of four in 2010—an increase of almost 3 percentage points over 2000, though these increases did not occur evenly throughout the country (Kneebone and Berube 2011).
