low unemployment rate. A May 2019 poll conducted by NPR found that among rural Americans, 40% struggle to pay for healthcare, food and housing, and 49% could not pay cash for a $1,000 emergency, and would instead choose to borrow in order to pay for such an unexpected emergency expense. Some experts assert that the US has experienced a "two-tier recovery", which has benefitted 60% of the population, while the other 40% on the "lower tier" have been struggling to pay bills as the result of stagnant wages, increases in the cost of housing, education and healthcare, and growing debts. A 2021 study by the National Low Income Housing Coalition found that workers would have to make at least $24.90 an hour to be able to afford (meaning 30% of a person's income or less) renting a standard two-bedroom home or $20.40 for a one-bedroom home anywhere in the US. The former is 3.4 times higher than the current federal minimum wage. Poverty Starting in the 1980s relative poverty rates have consistently exceeded those of other wealthy nations, though analyses using a common data set for comparisons tend to find that the U.S. has a lower absolute poverty rate by market income than most other wealthy nations. Extreme poverty in the United States, meaning households living on less than $2 per day before government benefits, doubled from 1996 levels to 1.5 million households in 2011, including 2.8 million children. In 2013, child poverty reached record high levels, with 16.7 million children living in food insecure households, about 35% more than 2007 levels. As of 2015, 44 percent of children in the United States live with low-income families. In 2016, 12.7% of the U.S. population lived in poverty, down from 13.5% in 2015. The poverty rate rose from 12.5% in 2007 before the Great Recession to a 15.1% peak in 2010, before falling back to just above the 2007 level. In the 1959–1962 period, the poverty rate was over 20%, but declined to the all-time low of 11.1% in 1973 following the War on Poverty begun during the Lyndon Johnson presidency. In June 2016, The IMF warned the United States that its high poverty rate needs to be tackled urgently. The population in extreme-poverty neighborhoods rose by one third from 2000 to 2009. People living in such neighborhoods tend to suffer from inadequate access to quality education; higher crime rates; higher