The authors use longitudinal data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation spanning 1996 to 1999 to estimate the prevalence of short- and long-term poverty among working-age people with and without disabilities. Depending on the disability measure used, annual poverty rates are 2 to 5 times higher among people with disabilities compared to those without disabilities. The relative long-term poverty rates among those with disabilities are much higher than the relative short-term poverty rates. People with disabilities represented 47% of those in poverty in 1997 according to an annual measure of poverty and 65% of those in poverty according to a long-term measure. The reasons that disability receives little attention in the poverty literature may be that most statistics are based on short-term measures, which partially mask the strong relationship between long-term poverty and long-term disability, and outdated perceptions of the relationship between disability and the ability to work.
- The fact that people with disabilities are that much more likely to be poverty stricken shows and those people need more money because the cost of living is so much more expensive.