75% of Americans will spend at least on year at or near poverty

Mark Robert Rank, 66, is a professor of social welfare at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the co-author of "Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong About Poverty."

"According to your analysis, 60 percent of Americans will spend at least a year of their life in poverty. That’s just a shocking number for the wealthiest country in the world.

Yeah, and a lot of people are surprised at that. We show that 60 percent of the population between 20 and 75 will experience one year below the official poverty line, which is very conservative. And three-quarters of Americans will experience either poverty or near poverty, just above the poverty line. So people ask me: Why are those numbers so large? And one of the reasons is: If you look over longer periods of time, what happens is that things occur to us that we didn’t anticipate. So things like losing a job or a family splitting up or getting sick or a pandemic occurring. When they occur in the United States there’s not a lot to protect people. The safety net in the United States is very, very weak. So when these things happen, folks are very much at risk of falling into poverty."