Family unit incomes of the elderly and children, 1994

The economic status of the elderly and that of children are analyzed using a comprehensive definition of income that takes selected types of noncash income and taxes into account. Estimates are presented for detailed age groups over the entire age range and for socioeconomic classifications within the elderly subgroup and within the subgroup of children. The article finds that children and the elderly are less well-off than the middle age groups. This result is obtained using median incomes and the percentage of the group that has low income, as defined in this article. When results obtained with the measures presented in this article are compared with those obtained with more commonly used measures, there are important differences for both the elderly and for children. For both groups, the composition of the low-income population differs in important ways from the composition of the official poverty population.