Fact Sheets: Data at a Glance

The recession has increased joblessness among older Americans. These graphs and tables report unemployment rates and how they have varied by age, sex, race, and education since 2007.

Improved health, educational gains, and declines in physically demanding work have improved employment prospects at older ages, yet significant challenges remain. This fact sheet reports key data points on older Americans' labor force participation, employment, unemployment, and related factors.

Increasing Social Security's retirement age would promote work at older ages, improve the system's solvency by shortening retirements and reducing lifetime benefits, and better target benefits to the oldest Americans. It could, however, create hardship for workers with health problems unless Congress improves the disability safety net. This fact sheet reports key data points in the arguments for and against increasing the retirement age.

This data brief is the second in a series that profiles children of immigrants using up-to-date Census data and other sources. The first brief highlighted the fast growth of the immigrant population and the increase in children of immigrants, along with important demographic trends. The current publication describes the family circumstances of children of immigrants, including family structure and parental employment.

The retirement savings of American households took a big hit when the stock market crashed in 2008. Recently, however, a good portion of these losses has been reversed. This fact sheet follows trends in retirement account balances since the beginning of 2005.

The Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area Foreclosure Monitor is a quarterly publication co-published by NeighborhoodInfo DC and the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. The Monitor gives a snapshot of the impact of foreclosures on the region, as well as broader sales market trends. Almost 149,000 households were at least 30 days late on their mortgage payments, with almost one-quarter of those already in foreclosure. While foreclosures remain a serious problem, the sales market showed signs of improvement by December 2009. The sales volume was up from the year before, and the median sales price rose 6.6% in one year to $315,000.

Social Security's current path is unsustainable. With average life spans increasing, the working-age population is not growing fast enough to support the growing number of retirees at current benefit levels and tax rates. Benefit cuts, revenue enhancements, or some combination could return the system to balance. The arithmetic is fairly straightforward, but impacts on workers and retirees depend crucially on design details. Using a microsimulation model, we show distributional effects of illustrative benefit-cut and revenue-enhancement options on retirees. Results show that impacts differ greatly for workers in different generations and age groups and with different lifetime earnings.

Many agree that the official measure of poverty in the United States is flawed. Experts have recommended an alternative measure of poverty that includes all family resources net of taxes and nondiscretionary expenses and updates the thresholds to reflect current spending patterns. This fact sheet describes the official poverty measure and an alternative measure developed by the National Academy of Sciences, and uses data from the 2006 American Community Survey to estimate the extent of poverty in Minnesota under the official and alternative measure.

Record numbers of older men and women began collecting Social Security benefits in 2009. New awards surged last year partly because the age-62 population grew rapidly. More importantly, older Americans were much more likely to claim Social Security in 2009 than recent previous years, probably because many seniors were unable to find work. Social Security benefits provide an important safety net for unemployed older adults, but early claimants receive permanently reduced benefits, threatening their future economic well-being.

Labor force participation rates have increased sharply for older men and women over the past 16 years. Between 1993 and 2009, the share of adults working or looking for work increased 39 percent for men and 66 percent for women. In 2009, adults age 55 and older made up nearly a fifth of the nation’s labor force, the highest share since 1948 when these records began. The growth in senior participation rates added 3.2 million adults age 62 and older to the nation’s workforce in 2009, compared with the number who would have participated if rates remained at their 1993 levels.