Many of the households who were poor despite their social security benefits were, of course, less poor than they would have been without them. Analysis now under way suggest that among aged families in poverty, about 1 in 4 of those that included a social security beneficiary needed less than $250 to bring their income for 1964 up to the poverty threshold and another fourth needed more than $250 but less than $500 additional income. Of the families in poverty who received no social security benefits, 3 out of 4 were more than $500 below the poverty line.

Among elderly persons living alone the effect of social security benefits in alleviating poverty was less striking than for couples. (Women receiving a widow's benefit are receiving little better than half the combined benefit payable to a worker and his wife, although the poverty threshold now in general use assumes a single person will need 80 percent as much as a couple.)

Of the aged living alone in poverty, 45 percent of the social security beneficiaries fell short of the poverty threshold by $500 or more, compared with 75 percent of the nonbeneficiaries.

In 1962, according to a Social Security Administration survey, retirement benefits under the OASDHI program comprised 30 percent of the aggregate income of aged persons (including any younger spouses); public assistance checks, veterans' benefits, or payments from other public programs accounted for another 16 percent; and earnings made up 32 percent. In 1964, as reported to the Bureau of the Census, families with an aged head (including some younger persons) derived 25 percent of all their income from social security payments, and about half from earnings. Aged families classed as poor by the poverty index received as a group 60 percent of their income from social security benefits and only 16 percent from earnings. That social security payments were not enough in themselves to protect against poverty is clear. Yet, households with a head aged 65 or older and no earnings in 1964 were much more likely to be poor when no one received any social security benefits than when someone in the family did, as the following figures illustrate :

Nearly 15 million of the 34 million counted poor in 1964 were children under age 18 living in families. Because nonwhite children run a risk of poverty four times that of the white, about 40 percent of the children counted poor were nonwhite. Because large families are so much more prone to poverty than small, families with five or more children contributed 6.7 million youngsters to the count.

Lenore A. Epstein, "Income of the Aged in 1962: First Findings of the 1963 Survey of the Aged," Social Security Bulletin, March 1964, pages 3-24.

For most of the youngsters growing up in poverty, their working years were still in the future and their present security depended primarily on the earnings or other income available to their parents. For 6.1 million of the children counted poor, the status reflected the fact that 12 million men and one-half million women who were employed full time the year around did not earn enough to support their children. (An additional 400,000 families of fully employed breadwinners with no children were in poverty also.) If the low-income index rather than the poverty criterion is used as a gauge, about 101⁄2 million children in 3 million families must be counted as poor or near poor despite the year-round employment of the working head.

Half the workers whose family was poor even though they were not unemployed during the year were laborers, service workers or farmers, compared with only 1 in 7 of the fully employed workers heading nonpoor families. On the other hand, only 8 percent of the year-round employed but poor family heads had professional, technical, or clerical jobs, jobs generally requiring some higher education. Twenty-nine percent of the year-round workers at the head of nonpoor families held such jobs.

The direct bearing of education on job potential and consequently on the risk of poverty reinforces the need for ensuring that young people carry their schooling at least to high school graduation. Many youngsters in poor families now don't do so. The resultant low earning capacity is then aggravated by the fact that school leavers tend to marry early, thus further increasing the odds that they will bring up their own children in poverty."

10

Included in the households of the poor in 1964 were 3 million persons aged 16-21. Half were still in school and nearly one-sixth, no longer in school, had a high school diploma. But more than a third were not in school and were not high school graduates; this group included half the young men who had already taken on the role of a family head. In nonpoor households by contrast only

1 in 7 of the nearly 15 million persons aged 16-21 was neither in school nor a high school graduate (table 9):

10 See Alvin L. Schorr, "Family Cycle and Income Development," Social Security Bulletin, February 1966.

Data for 1963 showed relatively few teenagers in poor families, suggesting that such families may not hold their youngsters as long as families who are better off. The data for 1964 reenforce the implication. They do indicate, however, a less pronounced relationship between school attendance and family relationship for nonwhite youngsters than for white; Nonwhite boys appear to marry later than white boys regardless of schooling and nonwhite girls are more likely than white girls at an early age to find themselves serving as head of a family. These patterns are undoubtedly related to the proverty proneness of the nonwhite population and the limited earnings opportunity for the men.

That low educational attainment went hand in hand with poverty was true regardless of family status, but yougsters already out on their own were more often poor than those who had not yet left home. Shown below are the poverty rates for persons aged 16-21 in each family status group-that is, the percentage who were in a household with 1964 income below the poverty line.

1 Income of family or unrelated individuals below SSA poverty index.

Whether it is that they are no longer in school that impels toward marriage or whether it is the desire to marry that interrupts the schooling, it is clear that youngsters who leave school before the twelfth grade take on family responsibility earlier than those who, go to high school and stay on to graduate. Among boys aged 18-19 who have left school without a high school diploma, 1 in 5 is already the head of a family group; of the high school graduates in this age group who are no longer in school, 1 in 9 is a family head; but of the 18- and 19-year-old boys still in school, only 1 percent has taken on family responsibility (table 10):