Data on income, health insurance coverage, and poverty are available here.
“Families are seeing the benefits of a strong economy and rising wages, especially in rural areas,” said Arthur Phillips, an economic policy analyst at the Maine Center for Economic Policy. “These income gains are key to improving financial security for millions of Americans. However, at the national level, the sad reality remains that people of color and women did not have the same gains as white households and male workers. Policymakers at the federal and state level should do more to ensure our economy can help all people thrive.”
State level estimates of poverty using the Supplemental Poverty Measure show that Maine maintained its place as the state with the lowest share of its population living in poverty on average between 2021 and 2023. While 82,000 Mainers were still considered poor after accounting for government assistance programs, this was just 5.9% of the population. The combined effects of state and federal assistance helped move tens of thousands of Mainers out of poverty. Given that some of this was due to the one-time relief payments sent out in 2021 and 2022, lawmakers still have work to maintain this progress.
Highlights from data release
Income:
- “Real median household income was $80,610 in 2023, a 4% increase from the 2022 estimate of $77,540 … the first statistically significant annual increase in real median household income since 2019.”
- Those income increases were concentrated in white households – there was no significant change in median incomes for Black, Asian, and Hispanic households.
- Median earnings for men working full-time saw larger wage gains than women. For full-time, year-round workers, the female-to-male earnings ratio in 2023 fell to 82.7% from 84% in 2022 (Figure 6 and Table A-6). This is the first statistically significant annual decrease in the female-to-male earnings ratio since 2003.
- Rural households have lower incomes but saw greater income growth (7.5%) than those living in metropolitan areas (3.7%)
Health insurance:
- The national uninsured rate was essentially flat at 8%. In Medicaid expansion states like Maine, there were upticks in the uninsured rate for Americans with lower incomes. This may be partly due to the unwinding of the extended eligibility for Medicaid during the pandemic. Maine has generally been one of the best states for ensuring that Mainers don’t lose coverage for paperwork reasons, so the impact may look different here.
Poverty:
- The official poverty measure declined slightly between 2022 and 2023 (11.5% to 11.1%) but the Supplemental Poverty Measure increased slightly over the same period (12.4% to 12.9%). This might reflect that government assistance programs aren’t keeping pace with the cost of living.
- The official poverty rate of 11.1% is still higher than pre-pandemic rate of 10.5% in 2019. The same was true for the SPM (which was 11.8% in 2019).
- The biggest anti-poverty programs in the US were Social Security, which lifted 27.6 million older people out of poverty, followed by refundable tax credits like the EITC (6.4 million) SNAP (3.4 million), housing vouchers (2.8 m), SSI (2.5 m), refundable CTC (2.4 m) and school lunch program (1.1 million)
- In state-level estimates, Maine continued to have the lowest supplemental poverty rate of any state between 2021-2023, at 5.9%. Last year Maine also had the lowest 3-year average SPM rate of any state. This was higher than the rate between 2020-22, which averaged 4.6%. At least some of the low rate is due to the one-time pandemic relief checks sent out by the legislature, so it’s likely that the rate will go up again without more legislative action in future years.
Maine Center for Economic Policy (MECEP) is an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan research and policy organization dedicated to improving the economic wellbeing of Mainers with low and moderate income. Since 1994, MECEP has helped secure improved economic opportunity for Mainers throughout their lives by advocating for fairer tax policies; access to education, health care, and livable wage jobs; and critical investment in government programs and services on which Maine people rely.
