• By SARAH CHACKO
• Advocate Capitol News Bureau
• Published: Sep 29, 2009 - Page: 1A

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Louisiana’s poverty rate dropped by a little more than 1 percentage point from 2007 to 2008, according to data released today by the U.S. Census Bureau.

However, the state still ranks among the worst in the nation with 17.3 percent of the population living below the poverty line.

Officials with the state Department of Social Services and some nonprofit agencies said Monday that they had not seen the embargoed data that was released to the public today.

Deborah Jones, program director of the YWCA Center for Family Empowerment, said she wondered how the 1 percentage point improvement stood up to other states.

“We’re still 49th or 50th in the nation in every indicator of child well-being,” she said, referring to other poverty-related problems such as teen pregnancy, low-birth-weight babies and high school dropouts.

Arkansas, Kentucky, New Mexico and West Virginia also have poverty rates around 17 percent, according to the data from the American Community Survey. Mississippi has the largest population living in poverty with 21.2 percent.

In 2008, the poverty threshold for a family of four, including two children, was $21,834.

The national poverty rate is around 13 percent.

Data released earlier this month through another Census Bureau survey, the Current Population Survey, showed Louisiana’s poverty rate increasing. But the Current Population Survey does not include as large a data sample as the American Community Survey.

The Current Population Survey is a monthly survey of about 50,000 households conducted by the Census Bureau for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The American Community Survey is sent to about 250,000 addresses per month.

According to the larger survey, the average annual household income in Louisiana increased from $58,889 in 2007 to $60,616 in 2008. About 30 percent of residents were earning less than $25,000 and 16 percent were earning more than $100,000.

The number of people receiving food stamps in Louisiana increased by 4 percentage points, from 12.1 percent in 2007 to 16.2 percent in 2008.

The YWCA’s Jones, who had not yet seen the full data, said the increase probably resulted from the national economic downturn finally trickling into Louisiana, which has historically been behind national trends.