New Census Reports Show 23% of Tennessee Kids Are Poor

Nearly a quarter of Tennessee’s children live at or below the poverty level. That’s just one finding in a new report from the Census Bureau.

The state ranks eighth in the nation for the percentage of children who are poor. Within Tennessee, children 18 years or younger are more likely to be impoverished than the state’s population as a whole.

Household incomes in the state are about 8-thousand dollars a year less than the US average, putting Tennessee 43rd in that ranking.

One Tennessee figure is pretty much the same as the rest of America: about 85 percent of the population has some sort of health insurance. But people here are slightly more likely to get that coverage via Medicaid or Medicare. And compared to the national numbers, almost twice as many Tennesseans are on military health plans.