Greg Kaufmann | The Nation

TheNation.com created This Week in Poverty to keep the struggles of the poor and near-poor front and center for its readers every week. Now, as we enter the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, we are launching a new effort to help push the issue of poverty into the mainstream political debate.

Each Talk About Poverty (#TalkPoverty*) post will feature three to five questions for President Obama and Governor Mitt Romney from experts who know antipoverty policy inside-out. I will profile the individuals asking the questions so you get a sense of why they know what they are talking about; offer background on why these particular questions are being asked; and then lay the questions out for the candidates.

In the next month or so, when we’ve completed the #TalkPoverty series, The Nation will compile the best questions into a single questionnaire and hound the presidential campaigns for answers. You can offer your own questions on Twitter using the hashtag #TalkPoverty—some might be included in the final questionnaire.

We will also rely on your help to show politicians that people do, in fact, care about poverty and want their political leaders to address the issue in a thoughtful, informed way. Please tweet this article using #TalkPoverty, share it on Facebook and keep the conversation going in your own circles. The only way we will possibly get the candidates—and Washington—to talk about poverty is if we insist that they talk about poverty.

#TalkPoverty—tweet it, share it, use it.

When it comes to public policy and poverty in the US few people know more about it than Georgetown University Law Professor Peter Edelman. He has worked to eradicate poverty for nearly half a century, most notably as a legislative assistant to Senator Robert Kennedy and as an Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Clinton administration—a post he resigned in protest over the 1996 welfare reform bill. He’s also taught and written extensively on the subject, including in his recent book, So Rich, So Poor: Why It’s So Hard to End Poverty in America.

Edelman attended Harvard Law School and clerked on the Supreme Court. But in an interview last year he told me the big change in his life occurred when he met Senator Robert Kennedy and went to work for him.

“Here was a man who really—I think unlike anybody at that level since—was just deeply committed to doing something very serious about poverty in this country and obviously the intersection of poverty and race,” said Edelman. “I had the opportunity to go around the country with him, and to learn as he learned—from listening and talking to people and seeing problems.”

Edelman said his travels with Kennedy taught him in ways that books never could have about “the different specific ways in which power disparities arranged themselves, whether in Mississippi, the Central Valley of California, Eastern Kentucky, the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota or Mayor Daley’s Chicago.”

Edelman and Kennedy visited places that were invisible to most Americans, including: Watts, South Central Los Angeles, four months before the civil unrest in 1965; Eastern Kentucky, where the children of former coal miners were going hungry because the mines had closed; and the fields of Delano, in California’s San Joaquin valley, where migrant farmworkers were attempting to organize.

But the experience that clearly changed Edelman’s life forever occurred in Mississippi in the spring of 1967. Kennedy held hearings there to highlight the importance of the state’s multi-county Head Start program in response to political pressure to defund the program.

Marian Wright—whom Edelman met for the first time and would later marry—was then 27 and head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund office in Mississippi, as well as General Counsel to the Child Development Group of Mississippi. She was supposed to testify about Head Start, but instead told the Senate subcommittee about near-starvation that was occurring in the state. The subcommittee and staff then toured with Wright to see children “who were tangibly severely malnourished—bloated bellies, running sores that wouldn’t heal.”

“It was this incredibly awful, powerful experience that’s with me all the time,” said Edelman. “I’ll never ever forget seeing those hungry children. Seeing things stokes one’s commitment to make a difference.”

Today, Edelman has an uncanny ability to zero in on significant statistics and demographic trends and shed light on their public policy implications. He also has a knack for giving voice not only to the moral arguments that support an aggressive approach to eradicating poverty, but to the equally compelling economic arguments.

For example, in a July 29 op-ed for the New York Times, Edelman takes on the popular myth first coined by Ronald Reagan, “We fought a war on poverty and poverty won.”

Not so, Edelman argues. He notes work by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities demonstrating that without Social Security, food stamps, the earned-income tax credit, and the rest of the safety net, “poverty would be nearly double what it is now.” Indeed, instead of 46 million people living in poverty—living on less than $22,314 for a family of four—there would be about 86 million people living in poverty.

“To say that ‘poverty won’ is like saying the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts failed because there is still pollution,” writes Edelman.

Edelman suggests that the real reasons for persistent poverty include the proliferation of low-wage jobs; a “gaping hole” that’s been ripped in the safety net in terms of vanishing cash assistance for low-income mothers and children; and “persistent issues of race and gender” that lead to higher poverty rates for minorities and families headed by single mothers. He points to research by the Economic Policy Institute showing that half the jobs in the nation pay less than $34,000 a year; and one-quarter pay less than $23,000 annually. Also, wages for jobs in the bottom half have increased just 7 percent since 1972.

These are some of the most significant trends Edelman is focused on these days, nearly fifty years after he began his life’s work combating poverty.

He now asks President Obama and Governor Romney these specific questions:

1) US government statistics show 20.5 million people with incomes below half the poverty line—less than about $9,500 for a family of three—up from 12.6 million in 2000. What will you do about this critical problem?

2) US government statistics show 103 million people with incomes below twice the poverty line—below about $45,000 for a family of four. This reflects the large number of low-wage jobs in the nation. What will you do to increase the income of these people who are struggling to make ends meet every month?

3) Urban concentrated poverty has climbed again close to the high point it reached in 1990. What will you do to help improve the quality of life of people who are currently isolated in America’s inner cities?

4) Rural poverty persists as a blight for people across the country, from Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta and the Alabama Black Belt to the colonias of south Texas, and Indian reservations in many places. What will you do to help reduce the poverty in these places?

5) Investments in early childhood are key to children’s prospects for productive lives. Federal assistance for childcare currently reaches about one in seven of those who are eligible. What will you do to increase the availability of quality childcare to more low-income children?

More questions from experts are coming soon. In the meantime, let @MittRomney and @BarackObama know you want them to Talk About Poverty, #TalkPoverty—and send them a link to Edelman’s questions.

*Editor's Note: An earlier version of this post included the hashtag #TAP, which has since been replaced by the hashtag #TalkPoverty.

“A partisan disgrace,” declared Speaker John Boehner.

“President Obama now wants to strip the established work requirements from welfare,” Governor Mitt Romney charged.

“The end of welfare reform as we know it,” warned Robert “You Aren’t Poor If You Have Air Conditioning” Rector, of the Heritage Foundation.

The source of all of this consternation?

A memo from Health and Human Services (HHS) announcing that it will “allow states to test alternative and innovative strategies, policies, and procedures that are designed to improve employment outcomes for needy families.… The Secretary is interested in using her authority to approve waiver demonstrations to challenge states to engage in a new round of innovation that seeks to find more effective mechanisms for helping families succeed in employment.”

In short, let states explore new ways to get better results from their efforts to employ low-income people in good jobs.

Sound familiar? Giving states more flexibility to run their Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) programs? The notion that local folks might have some of the best ideas on how to help people in their jurisdictions?

It’s straight out of the Republican playbook. Only this time around the proposal is from a Democratic Administration, so suddenly it’s not kosher.

The fact is that in 2005 Governor Romney and twenty-eight other Republican governors wrote a letter requesting more “flexibility to manage their TANF programs and effectively serve low-income populations,” including “increased waiver authority.” Indeed the New York Times reports that two of the first five states to express interest in the new waiver policy—Utah and Nevada—have Republican Governors.

“It’s really unfortunate that politics have totally overtaken this in Washington,” Liz Schott, senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), told me. “This is an area where there is actually not that much disagreement that TANF programs should be focused on the best ways to help people prepare for, find and keep jobs.”

I asked Schott to walk me through exactly what these waivers would do, because deciphering this stuff is kind of like settling down to a good novel written in legalese.

Currently, much of what a state does in administering TANF is driven by an effort to meet a target “work participation rate”—which usually means having more than 50 percent of its TANF recipients (including 90 percent of two-parent families) working thirty hours per week. If a state doesn’t meet that target rate, it can face steep fines from the federal government, as we are currently seeing in Ohio.

As a result, states aren’t necessarily as motivated by a desire to connect families to good, sustainable employment as much as they are looking simply to move people into activities that fulfill the work participation requirement.

For example, maybe someone is steered into a job-training program with no job (or a very low-wage job) on the other end; and then the individual repeats that program with the same disappointing result. Or maybe the person performs a “community service” with no wage and no prospects for advancement—like sweeping the county garage, or cleaning toilets in an office building, or filing papers for a non-profit.

“Currently it’s all about whether an individual is participating in certain activities for a certain number of hours,” said Schott. “Whether that’s the right activity or an effective activity to find and keep a good job is largely irrelevant.”

Schott said that a waiver might allow a state to decide, for example, that it’s a priority for TANF recipients to obtain a GED, or to complete two years of post-secondary or vocational education.

“A state could decide that a single parent working twenty hours, plus taking care of a kid, plus going to school, is going to interfere with her ability to be successful as a parent and a worker in the economy,” said Schott. “So it could request that these parents be permitted to go to school full-time and have that count towards the required work participation rate.”

Other waiver possibilities outlined in the memo include strategies to serve people with disabilities more effectively (the employment rate for people with disabilities in 2010 was a stunning 18.6 percent); and counting people in subsidized jobs towards meeting a state’s work participation rate.

Any waiver is subject to meeting “interim performance targets” and a “federally approved evaluation.” In other words, the pilot projects have to demonstrate that they are improving employment outcomes for low-income people in order to continue.

Republicans in the House and Senate have already introduced bills that would deny HHS waiver authority. What is striking about this overreaction isn’t just GOP leaders’ hypocrisy on the issue of allowing states more flexibility, but that they went apoplectic over some pretty modest reforms—reforms that are focused on jobs and measurable outcomes. Congress has put off TANF reauthorization for a couple of years running now, but at some point—I’m guessing in 2013—it won’t be able to ignore that obligation any longer.

Can you imagine the outcry if there were good, aggressive reforms offered by Democrats—the kind found in Congresswoman Gwen Moore’s RISE Act? Among the smart changes Moore calls for are: adjusting each state’s block grant for inflation so it’s no longer frozen at 1996 funding levels, unchanged for the past 16 years; allowing education and job training to count towards work requirements; providing childcare for all work-eligible parents; and prohibiting time limits of less than 60 months.

Now that would indeed be the end of welfare reform as we know it. Or at least the end of some of its most egregious failures—and the beginning of a system with the interests of poor people at its heart.

The Real Deal on VAWA

“The House leadership’s Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) agenda seems to be much like its so-called economic agenda: it harms those who are weakest and those who need these programs the most.”

That’s how Lisalyn Jacobs, vice president for government relations at Legal Momentum—the nation’s oldest legal defense and education fund for women and girls—explains the flawed House VAWA bill and Speaker John Boehner’s refusal to reconcile it with a stronger, bipartisan Senate version.

The Senate bill—championed by Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy and Republican Senator Mike Crapo—passed with sixty-eight votes, including fifteen Republicans; the House bill passed along a party-line vote with twenty-three Republicans voting against it.

The Senate bill includes new protections for Native American women by allowing tribal court systems to prosecute domestic violence abusers—whether the abuser is native or not. Currently, most sexual assaults and domestic violence crimes on Native lands go unpunished, particularly by non-Native abusers.

“Indian country is the poorest of the poor, however you slice it, and Native women are more victimized than any other group of women in the country,” says Jacobs.

In a speech on the Senate floor yesterday, Senator Patty Murray noted, “One in three Native women will be raped in their lifetimes, two in five of them [are] victims of domestic violence, and they are killed at ten times the rate of the national average.”

The Senate bill also ensures that special visas remain available to immigrant women who report abuse and cooperate with law enforcement; extends protections to the LGBT community; and offers better protection for college students who face domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking. It also provides resources to help ensure that underserved populations—such as communities of color, the elderly, people in rural areas, people with disabilities, and others—have access to services.

Rather than proceed to reconcile the bills—with a House bill that is difficult to defend and lacking in bipartisan support—Speaker Boehner is hiding behind a procedural excuse known as a “blue slip” issue. As a New York Times editorial describes, “The Senate bill imposes a fee to pay for special visas that go to immigrant victims of domestic abuse. This runs afoul of the rule that revenue-raising measures must begin in the House.”

“Speaker Boehner is sitting there with his arms folded pretending that he can’t solve the very same problem that he did in fact solve in order to move the transportation bill,” says Jacobs. “He merely chooses not to solve it now so that he can avoid passing a bill which protects all victims regardless of immigration status, sexual orientation or anything else.”

Don’t just take Jacobs’ word for it. Five Republican Representatives wrote a letter to Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor urging them “to solve the blue slip problem as effectively as you did with the Transportation Bill.” The GOP Congressmen also called for the final bill to include the stronger Senate protections.

“We cannot allow VAWA to become another victim of election-year gridlock,” said Representative Judy Biggert (R-IL). “A strong, bicameral compromise can and should protect all victims of violence. And these recommendations reflect years of input from our volunteers and counselors on the front lines, fighting domestic violence in communities across the country.”

Time is running out. Congress is scheduled to recess next Thursday and doesn’t have too many workdays in September either. After that, it’s all campaigning, all the time.

“Yesterday we sent a letter from over 600 organizations to the House and Senate leadership urging them to complete their work on VAWA, but we still need people’s help,” says Jacobs. “Call your Senators and Representatives, tell them to finish the job before they go home. We need the improvements in the VAWA bills to become law. Survivors of domestic and sexual violence, dating violence and sexual assault, are relying on us to help get this bill out of Congress and onto the President’s desk.”

Notable Studies

“US poverty rates higher, Safety Net Weaker, Than in Peer Countries, Elise Gould and Hilary Wething, Economic Policy Institute. This report finds that among similarly developed countries, the United States stands out as the country with the highest poverty rate and one of the lowest levels of social expenditures.

“The relatively low social expenditures in the United States partially explains the high poverty rate,” said Gould. “When it comes to alleviating the effects of poverty, the U.S. could learn from its peers.”

Some of the major findings: Despite the relatively high earnings at the top of the US income scale, inequality in the United States is so severe that low-earning US workers are actually worse off than low-earning workers in all but seven peer countries; more than one in five children in the US lived in poverty—this level is over two times higher than the peer-country average of 9.8 percent; the average peer countries’ tax and transfer programs achieves a poverty-rate reduction of 17.4 percentage points—an effect nearly two times greater than that produced by such programs in the United States.

“Racial and Ethnic Differences in Receipt of Unemployment Insurance Benefits During the Great Recession,” Austin Nichols and Margaret Sims, Urban Institute. The Great Recession hit black workers harder; the unemployment rate was higher for non-Hispanic black than for non-Hispanic white or Hispanic workers; and black unemployed workers had the lowest receipt of Unemployment Insurance benefits, 23.8 percent compared to whites’ 33.2 percent. Differences persist even after controlling for education, past employment, and reasons for unemployment.

“Commencement Day: Six-Year Effects of a Freshman Learning Community Program at Kingsborough Community College,” Colleen Sommo, Alexander Mayer, Timothy Rudd, and Dan Cullinan, with Hannah Fresques, MDRC. A report on an unusually successful one-semester program at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn called “learning communities.” Kingsborough serves many poor students and is very diverse—black, Hispanic, Asian, white, and 40 percent foreign-born students.

The program placed freshmen into groups of up to twenty-five students who took three classes together during their first semester: a developmental or college-level English course, an academic course required for the student’s major, and a freshman orientation course. It also provided enhanced counseling and tutoring as well as textbook vouchers.

This brief program increased six-year graduation rates by 4.6 percentage points—one of the first rigorous studies to show that an intervention in a community college boosted graduation rates. This increase in graduation also made the program cost-effective—the cost per degree earned was lower per program group member than it was per control group member.

Other Resources

“2012 KIDS COUNT Data Book,” Annie E. Casey Foundation. Its 23rd annual state-by-state report of child well-being, this year’s edition reveals significant improvements in health outcomes and academic achievement for children in most states. Over the period of 2005 to 2011, improvements include a 20 percent decrease in the number of kids without health insurance and an 11 percent reduction in the rate of high school students not graduating in four years. But the Data Book also shows how kids and families continue to struggle economically in the wake of the Great Recession. In 2010, one-third of children had parents without secure employment—an increase of 22 percent, or approximately 4 million children, from 2008. From 2005 to 2010, the number of children living in poverty rose by 2.4 million.

“The State of America’s Children 2012 Handbook,” Children’s Defense Fund. This resource provides key national information in a range of areas, as well as state tables showing how children in your state are faring and how your state compares to other states in protecting children.

“A Portrait of Inequality 2012,” Children’s Defense Fund. A report showing the gross inequalities facing black children compared to white children, across all critical indicators of wellbeing. Also, “A Portrait of Inequality 2012—Hispanic Children in America.”

Clips

“Concentrated Poverty and Homicide in Chicago,” Steve Bogira
“Shorty’s Comeback,” Steve Bogira
“The Right Embraces ‘Big Government’,” Melissa Boteach
“Tax Hikes on the Working Poor,” David Callahan
“Food Stamps in Elmo’s World,” KJ Dell’Antonia
“America Has a Class Problem,” Peter Edelman
“New Orleans’ Other ‘Million Dollar Neighborhood’,” Shereen Marisol Meraji
“Summer Programs for Low-Income Youth,” Elsa Falkenburger
“Protecting SNAP: Notes from the Field,” Lisa Hamler-Fugitt
“Mayor Says Civil Disobedience by Janitors Justified,” Chris Moran
“Renters’ Tax Credit Would Promote Equity and Advance Balanced Housing Policy,” Barbara Sard and Will Fischer
“Having It All? Many Working Poor Parents Don’t Even Have Child Care,” Diana Scholl
“Official Poverty Measure Ignores Key Improvements in Safety Net Since 1960s,” Arloc Sherman
“Stories on Earned Sick Leave: Interview with Retail Action Project,” Spotlight on Poverty
“Women for Paid Sick Days,” Katrina vanden Heuvel
“Large, Profitable Companies Employ Most Minimum Wage Earners,” George Zornick

Get Involved

Affordable Housing for Parcel 42 (DC readers)
Dignity at Darden
House and Senate Bills to Increase Minimum Wage and Tipped Minimum Wage
Hyatt Boycott Goes Global

Vital Statistics

US poverty (less than $22,314 for a family of four): 46 million people, 15.1 percent of population.

Children in poverty: 16.4 million, 22 percent of all children, including 39 percent of African-American children and 35 percent of Latino children.

Number of poor children receiving cash aid: one in five.

Poverty rate for people in female-headed families: 42 percent.

Single mothers with incomes under $25,000: 50 percent.

Single mothers working: 67 percent.

Deep poverty (less than $11,157 for a family of four): 20.5 million people, 6.7 percent of population. Up from 12.6 million in 2000.

Increase in deep poverty, 1976-2010: doubled—3.3 percent of population to 6.7 percent.

Americans with no income other than food stamps: 6 million, 2 percent of population.

Twice the poverty level (less than $44,628 for a family of four): 103 million people, roughly 1 in 3 Americans.

Families receiving cash assistance, 1996: 68 for every 100 families living in poverty.

Families receiving cash assistance, 2010: 27 for every 100 families living in poverty.

Impact of public policy, 2010: without government assistance, poverty would have been twice as high—nearly 30 percent of population.

Quote of the Week

“It seriously disturbs me that people looking in from the outside sort of draws this conclusion that the young black males or the people who are victims of the 50 million circumstances and issues that plague Central City—have just drawn a conclusion that they don’t want better—because that’s not true, that’s not what I see, I’m living it. I can honest to God tell you this: every single person that I’ve given a chance, has done well.”
      —Candince McMillian, owner of a contracting business in Central City, New Orleans, on Marketplace.

This Week in Poverty posts every Friday morning. Please comment below. You can also e-mail me at WeekInPoverty@me.com and follow me on Twitter.

Governor Mitt Romney got all the press at the NAACP convention in Houston on Wednesday, but janitor Alice McAfee got a standing-o. She spoke to a packed auditorium about her plight and that of over 3,000 fellow janitors in the city.

The Houston janitors are currently paid an hourly wage of $8.35 and earn an average of $8,684 annually, despite cleaning the offices of some of the largest and most powerful corporations in the world—Chevron, ExxonMobil, Wells Fargo, Shell Oil, JPMorgan Chase and others in the “City of Millionaires.” They are asking building owners and cleaning contractors for a raise to $10 an hour over the next three years; the counter offer is a $0.50 pay raise phased in over five years, virtually guaranteeing that the janitors continue to live in poverty.

On Tuesday, following a month of protests and one-day strikes, 250 janitors in nine buildings walked off the job to begin a citywide strike. By today, janitors from eighteen buildings will have joined the picket line. They are protesting employer harassment—including potential stripping of healthcare benefits and workplace intimidation—in response to the workers’ attempt to improve wages and benefits. The workers won’t return to their jobs until the cleaning contractors return to the bargaining table.

“We think we’ve moved past discrimination but we haven’t,” McAfee told the convention. “Now it’s low-wage workers who are treated like second-class citizens.… This fight is about putting an end to discrimination once and for all—racism, discrimination against immigrants, and discrimination against the working poor. This is about restoring dignity to all work.”

In addition to giving McAfee a standing ovation, audience members started spontaneously handing her cash—and it just kept coming; a total of $3,200 in unsolicited donations will be deposited into the janitors’ strike fund.

I had a chance to speak with Ms. McAfee on the phone yesterday about her experience at the convention, her work, and where the strike is headed. She told me she’s been a janitor in Houston for thirty years.

“And I have never missed a day, I have never been late. I take great pride in my work,” she said.

McAfee works at the Galleria Tower II and describes her job as “very hard, very strenuous.”

“They used to give me five hours to do three floors,” she said. “Now I have four hours for five floors. Something’s wrong with the picture.”

Her voice sounded distinctly elderly to me, and Adriana Vasquez had spoken of older janitors whom she worries about as they tackle grueling work. I asked would she mind telling me her age?

“Tell you what,” she said, “age and weight are two things you don’t ask a lady.”

So we moved on. Like Vasquez, McAfee said she has to literally run to finish her work on time.

“You’re running from the time you get in until the time you leave because if you’re not, no way you’re going to complete the work,” she said. “You got to punch out at 10 pm on the dot or they will write you up for insubordination because you’re not doing what they tell you to do on time. We don’t have no breaks, and when you get finished you’re so tired you need somebody to drive you home.”

Beginning at 6 pm, McAfee’s work includes “heavy floors,” which she describes as “a lot of heavy garbage, boxes, books”—both Wilson Architects and JPMorgan Chase require this kind of labor. (She cleans for Chase on the fourth, twentieth and twenty-first floors. In Congress, CEO Jamie Dimon told Vasquez to call him at his office to discuss the fact that he doesn’t pay his janitors a living wage. So far, however, he hasn’t returned her call.) She cleans kitchenettes; mops the floors; does “high dusting and low dusting”; rids glass desktops of finger smudges; cleans and dusts pictures.

“I take great pride in my work and I like to do it right,” McAfee said. “But now that they have cut the hours and increased the workload, there’s just no way for me to do it the way I want to. I’m doing eight to twelve hours work in four hours, and it’s just impossible.”

McAfee said she has been “targeted” since joining the union. Not only did her employer then increase her workload and cut her hours, her supervisor said she “wants me off the job.”

“But I do my work, stay focused, stay prayed up and move on,” said McAfee.

Moving on this week meant telling the NAACP and others her story.

“People need to know we are professional janitors and when we go to work, we work hard,” she said. “Right now we’re needing to choose between turning on our AC, or our box fan, and buying gas. We give building owners and CEOs an honest day’s work and we are only asking for a fair, honest day’s pay in return.”

Feds Investigating Pennsylvania’s ‘Drop in Medicaid Enrollment’

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the 89,000 children in Pennsylvania who have lost their Medicaid coverage—including many with life-threatening illnesses who were mistakenly deemed ineligible. It looks like the federal government is asking questions about it too.

The Associated Press reports that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) hasn’t yet received a response from the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare (DPW) to its letter of inquiry sent June 14.

I obtained a copy of that letter which reads in part: “A large number of cases were closed for ‘failure to provide information’ or ‘failure to return renewal form’ at a time when DPW [was] unable to process within appropriate timeframes all the information beneficiaries had submitted to verify their eligibility.… It appears that it may have been improper to terminate Medicaid coverage for lack of requested information since an eligibility worker could not have been sure that such information had not been submitted by the beneficiary.”

According to the letter, DPW agreed in mid-April to review 12,000 closed cases “to determine whether any had been closed inappropriately.” The review was to begin with “3,000 pregnant women and newborns,” and DPW staff assured that those results “would be available soon.”

“We consider DPW’s [review] of closed cases to be an important step towards understanding the drop in Medicaid enrollment overall,” the letter reads.

As of Wednesday, still no word on those 3,000 pregnant women and newborns, or on the other 9,000 cases DPW is supposed to check out.

Medicaid for 297,000 South Carolinians

As my colleague George Zornick recently observed, Republican governors can hate on the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion all they want—in the end it’s state legislatures that will decide whether low-income Americans enjoy a rare and historic victory or are once again left to fend for themselves.

In South Carolina, advocates are already working to build the kind of formidable coalition needed to convince a Republican legislature not only to pass the Medicaid expansion but also to override an expected veto by Governor Nikki Haley—no easy task, since that would require a two-thirds majority in each chamber.

“We’re going to have to build a coalition of healthcare advocates, providers, businesses and insurance companies—working with those who have a financial interest in this thing, along with those who have a human interest because it’s simply the right thing to do,” says Sue Berkowitz, director of the South Carolina Appleseed Legal Justice Center, who has worked on poverty-related issues for thirty years.

According to the Urban Institute, 297,000 currently uninsured South Carolinian adults would be newly eligible for Medicaid under the expansion—232,000 of them live below the federal poverty line of $22,314 for a family of four. New federal tax credits and subsidies will be available only for people with incomes above the federal poverty line, so the 232,000 worse off citizens won’t receive that assistance either.

“By saying no to Medicaid expansion, Governor Haley is basically saying it will be status quo for the poorest of the poor—they get nothing,” says Berkowitz.

Of course, folks like Berkowitz have been making a powerful case for helping poor people from time immemorial. (See the dude Isaiah, 58:10: “And if thou draw out thy soul to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted soul; then shall thy light rise in darkness, and thy gloom be as the noon-day.”) Their work has contributed to some great victories. But if I were a betting man—or actually just a man with a pulse and a passing interest in US politics in the twenty-first century—I’d wager this decision will come down to what the powerful moneyed interests with a financial stake in Medicaid will do to fight for something that makes complete economic sense.

A new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes that the federal government is picking up 100 percent of the cost of the Medicaid expansion over the first three years; nearly 93 percent of the cost over the next nine years; and no less than 90 percent after that. That’s significantly higher than the 70 percent match South Carolina currently receives for Medicaid patients.

A state’s costs for the Medicaid expansion would also be offset by reduced expenses for mental health services and emergency hospital care for the uninsured. An Urban Institute report indicates that in 2008, state and local governments shouldered $10.6 billion—nearly 20 percent of the cost—to care for uninsured people in hospitals. Another study indicates that state and local governments provided 40 percent of the funding for state mental health agencies in 2009, amounting to $17 billion. Both of these state contributions would be significantly reduced as the federal government picks up more of the tab through Medicaid services.

In South Carolina, these factors and others would result in an actual savings of as much as $678 million from 2014–19, compared to the costs of opting out of the Medicaid expansion.

“I would also note that we have a multiplier of $3.50 for every federal Medicaid dollar spent in the state,” says Berkowitz. “The one growth industry we know we have here—besides union busting and Boeing—is healthcare. We’ve got a very sick population and the opportunity to bring down federal dollars to help solve that problem and get better health outcomes. But the governor clearly isn’t looking at any of this. It’s just pure politics to appeal to her Tea Party base.”

Berkowitz believes some in the business community will advocate for Medicaid expansion because a healthy workforce and stable healthcare attract good jobs to the state. Rejecting Medicaid is also bad for small businesses that can’t (or don’t) pay their employees enough to purchase health insurance. The employees wait until they are too sick to work and then are forced to turn to emergency care.

“Businesses are better off when employees have a [regular provider], receive preventive care, and have better health outcomes,” says Berkowitz.

The real difference-makers in the Medicaid decision might be hospitals. Under the Affordable Care Act, they will receive a smaller reimbursement for the emergency care provided to uninsured people—that’s one way the government pays for Medicaid expansion and the new federal subsidies to help individuals purchase health insurance. As Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein notes, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that Medicaid expansion would cut South Carolina’s uninsured rate among eligible adults by 56.4 percent—the fourth-largest drop in the nation. That significantly improves hospitals’ bottom lines.

But Berkowitz says that “the business and provider communities are not exactly profiles in courage all of the time.” When advocates worked to pass the cigarette tax ten years ago, many health care providers who privately agreed with it said they couldn’t take a public stand. It wasn’t until the tax gained traction with the public that they joined in the coalition.

Getting that kind of traction this time around might prove difficult.

“There’s just a huge lack of compassion for the poor among a lot of folks in our electorate,” says Berkowitz. “And the money being funneled to our opponents is huge. So far, the national foundations and funders who are on our side are putting money into states where the fight over Medicaid is much easier. We need them to not think of us as a lost cause. We’re not giving up this fight.”

Great Resource from Demos

Tracking American Poverty & Policy is a powerful data visualization that tracks American poverty over the decades, with breakdowns by race, gender, education and more. The tool was unveiled at Demos’ national bi-partisan conference earlier this week, co-hosted with Center on Budget and Policy Priorities; the Georgetown Center on Poverty, Inequality and Public Policy; and The American Prospect. The conference examined what low wages, low job growth, demographic and cultural trends and budget-cutting plans mean for Americans in poverty or near-poverty.

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Articles and other Resources

“Nikki Haley Slashes Support for Violence Victims…,” Bryce Covert

“To Beat Odds, Poor Single Moms Need Wide Safety Net,” Pam Fessler

“House Proposes Cutting Food Stamps by $16 billion,” Food Research and Action Center

“Moor Latino Children Go Hungry Under Roby Amendment,” Sarah Jane Glynn

“Low Wage Rates and Low Income Very Common for Employed Single Mothers,” Legal Momentum

“Study Confirms Importance of Child Care Subsidies for Working Families,” Hannah Matthews

“Lawsuit: Republican Supervisors Designed System to Cheat Indigent $38 per Month,” R. Scott Moxley

“For Black Americans, Financial Damage from Subprime Implosion Likely to Last,” Ylan Mui

“National Coalition for Paid Sick Days, Family Leave Insurance Convenes in DC,” National Partnership for Women & Families

Vital Statistics

US poverty (less than $22,314 for a family of four): 46 million people, 15.1 percent of population.

Children in poverty: 16.4 million, 22 percent of all children, including 39 percent of African-American children and 35 percent of Latino children.

Number of poor children receiving cash aid: one in five.

Poverty rate for people in female-headed families: 42 percent.

Single mothers with incomes under $25,000: 50 percent.

Single mothers working: 67 percent.

Deep poverty (less than $11,157 for a family of four): 20.5 million people, 6.7 percent of population. Up from 12.6 million in 2000.

Increase in deep poverty, 1976–2010: doubled—3.3 percent of population to 6.7 percent.

Americans with no income other than food stamps: 6 million, 2 percent of population.

Twice the poverty level (less than $44,628 for a family of four): 103 million people, roughly 1 in 3 Americans.

Families receiving cash assistance, 1996: 68 for every 100 families living in poverty.

Families receiving cash assistance, 2010: 27 for every 100 families living in poverty.

Impact of public policy, 2010: without government assistance, poverty would have been twice as high—nearly 30 percent of population.

Quotes of the Week

“We’re at this very unusual moment where there’s the potential for one of the biggest steps forward for low-income families in several decades if the Medicaid expansion is fully implemented in every state and the deficit reduction for the mid- and long-term that we need were achieved in a way that protects people at the bottom. But there is also a significant possibility that—depending on the outcome of the election—the entire Affordable Care Act is repealed, or perhaps even a majority of states do not take the Medicaid expansion; and, more fundamentally, we could achieve large-scale deficit reduction in a way that really devastates programs focused on low-income people, destroys the structure of Medicaid, food stamps, huge cuts in the Pell Grants for low-income kids. I don’t ever remember a time when there was the potential for as huge rollbacks as there is now.”
—Bob Greenstein, president, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities,
speaking at Demos conference

“They try to pit the Latinos against the blacks—to separate us—but we’re not going to be separated, we’re together. We’re going to stand together because we are our sisters and brothers and that’s how we look at it on the job.”
—Alice McAfee, on cleaning contractors’ efforts to divide Houston janitors

This Week in Poverty posts every Friday morning. Please comment below. You can also e-mail me at WeekInPoverty@me.comand follow me on Twitter.

Since August 2011, 89,000 children in Pennsylvania have lost their Medicaid coverage, including many with life-threatening illnesses who were mistakenly deemed ineligible. The state currently hasn’t a clue whether many of these children have any healthcare coverage at all.

How did this happen?

In late summer, the Pennsylvania Department of Welfare (DPW) began notifying hundreds of thousands of families by mail that they had ten days to provide necessary documentation in order to keep their children enrolled in Medicaid. If the family missed the deadline—or even if they met it but DPW failed to process the paperwork within the ten days—they were dropped from Medicaid.

Federal law indeed requires that families prove their Medicaid eligibility annually. Pennsylvania requires verification every six months. During the previous administration, under Democratic Governor Ed Rendell, caseloads grew as a result of the recession, while county assistance offices were shorthanded due to budget cuts. Caseworkers simply couldn’t keep pace with the workload and there was a backlog of renewal applications.

Enter Republican Governor Tom Corbett and his anti-spending, anti-government secretary of public welfare, Gary Alexander. They decided to plow ahead with their new approach to eligibility verification: ten days to receive and process the overdue renewals, and an assumption of ineligibility if the applications weren’t reviewed during that time period.

Predictably, the offices couldn’t keep up with the new deluge of mail. It doesn’t seem a stretch to suggest that a Republican administration—hostile to Medicaid—had identified a weakness in the system, exploited it, so that it could reduce spending while bolstering its claim that the system is broken.

Who are some of the victims wronged by the Corbett-Alexander approach to children’s health? A 5-year-old with leukemia; a 2-year-old with a congenital heart disorder; a severely disabled 12-year-old who requires home healthcare; 9-year-old twins, one with autism, the other with a hearing impairment; a 1-year-old with cerebral palsy.

Imagine, a parent of a toddler battling cancer, and suddenly a need to—as one advocate put it—“engage in a Kafkaesque process of getting your kid back on Medicaid.”

What is also deeply disturbing is this: normally when a child is no longer Medicaid-eligible in Pennsylvania parents are referred to the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), a federally subsidized healthcare program for low-income kids. The state takes great pride in near universal coverage of children—it offered one of the first CHIP programs in the country in 1992. But as advocates watched Medicaid enrollment fall off a cliff—89,000 dropped between August 2011 and January 2012—CHIP enrollment remained flat.

Where the hell are the kids? advocates began to ask.

DPW’s initial explanation was that the 89,000 kids dropped included families that moved out of state or were no longer income-eligible. But, when pressed for an accounting, DPW’s own analysis revealed that the number of families falling within these categories is paltry.

Secretary Alexander also played games with the numbers. As recently as May 1, during an interview on Pennsylvania public radio, he said: “It wasn’t children that were removed, it was families. We call them cases—so that there are parents and children.”

But Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to improving the health, education and wellbeing of children and youth throughout the state, says that simply isn’t true. It points to DPW’s own records, which show that the 89,000 figure represents children dropped from Medicaid.

Secretary Alexander also offered this explanation for the state’s actions: “The problem we have, of course, is that we have federal rules and regulations that we have to follow and we have to do those redeterminations every six months.”

Actually, the problem the secretary has is either ignorance or lying: federal law requires eligibility renewals only once a year, and in some states even a verbal statement regarding income is sufficient.

Alternatives to DPW’s current neglectful approach have been offered: What about following up with phone calls and multiple mailings to ensure that children weren’t improperly denied coverage? Or a moratorium on dropping kids from the program until DPW is certain it is adequately processing the renewals? Or at least halting six-month eligibility reviews of children with the most serious illnesses? All of these options are permitted under federal law.

Every proposal or idea has been rejected, and tens of thousands of kids remain virtually disappeared by the Corbett-Alexander approach to healthcare.

Pennsylvania Set to Eliminate Safety Net of Last Resort

“On Sunday, nearly 70,000 Pennsylvanians with disabilities will lose their sole source of income overnight,” legal aid lawyer Michael Froehlich of Community Legal Services in Philadelphia told me yesterday.

The sudden elimination of the “safety net of last resort”—the General Assistance (GA) program—is especially troubling when one considers who is currently eligible for it: disabled or sick adults without children; domestic violence survivors, many of whom have just fled abusers (lifetime benefit capped at nine months); adults participating in alcohol and other drug treatment programs (also capped at nine months); adults caring for someone sick or disabled, or an unrelated child; and children living with an unrelated adult.

In all, over 90 percent of recipients are temporarily or permanently disabled. The 68,000 people in the program—or just about one in every 200 residents—receive approximately $205 per month. Those funds enable many people to rent a room, pay for transportation to needed appointments, cover co-pays, or escape abuse. DPW estimates that eliminating the GA program will save the state $150 million annually.

According to Froehlich, when the GA rolls were trimmed in 1982, 1994 and 1996, people were provided sixty days notice. But this time “many people won’t find out until they go to withdrawal their money next week to pay their July rent.”

There are reports that the welfare office in Philadelphia is bringing in additional guards to protect staff on Monday.

Froehlich and Community Legal Services are part of PA Cares for All, a coalition of more than 100 organizations that initially fought to save the program and then offered an alternative proposal: eliminate GA assistance for approximately 40,000 people, but maintain it for 30,000 of the most sick and disabled; plus children, domestic violence survivors and people actively participating in drug and alcohol treatment programs. That plan would cost $42.l million annually, and allow an annual savings of $107.9 million.

“We’ve just tried every way we can to mitigate the harm,” said Froehlich.

The coalition has pressed its case on both moral and economic grounds. In a May 22 “Open Letter to Pennsylvania House and Senate Members,” the coalition writes: “No child should be homeless. In fact, no one should be homeless. People with disabilities and older adults should be able to live safely and with dignity. Women and children should be able to live free from violence, especially in their own homes.”

The coalition also argues that cutting the program makes absolutely no fiscal sense.

“The loss of General Assistance will be more expensive for taxpayers,” the letter reads, noting that if just 7 percent of current recipients enter the criminal justice system, $150 million in savings from eliminating the program will suddenly be a $9 million overall cost to taxpayers. If just 1 percent of current recipients end up in psychiatric hospitals the overall cost of eliminating the program will be $20 million; and if just 20 percent end up in homeless shelters that will mean a $23 million hit to taxpayers instead of any savings. (And the coalition projects that the number of current GA recipients turning to the shelter system will be much higher than 20 percent; people will quickly overwhelm the shelters, houses of worship and human services providers.)

According to Froehlich, the most frustrating part about this decision is that the resources are available if Governor Corbett or the legislature had any interest at all in preserving the program. In fact, the state just announced a $1.65 billion tax credit to Shell Oil over twenty-five years in order to bring an ethylene cracker plant to Western Pennsylvania. According to the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center, “the 400 permanent jobs at the plant will come at a hefty price to taxpayers, $165,000 per year per job, or $4.125 million per job over the 25-year life of the program.”

“And the administration’s saying we can’t come up with $42 million for our alternative proposal to help the very most vulnerable, most needy Pennsylvanians?” said Froehlich.

Froehlich has begun getting calls from clients who are asking, “What’s next? What are we going to do?”

“I don’t have an answer for most of them,” he said. “I got nothing.”

Poverty and Pride

Tomorrow is the last day of LGBT Pride Month: a time for individuals to be visible and out, and for a movement of LGBT and non-LGBT people to demonstrate that we’re here and not going anywhere. It’s also a time to reflect on the progress we’ve made and to recommit to the work that remains in order to achieve full equality.

Some of that work involves paying much more attention to LGBT folks living in poverty.

A report issued by the Movement Advancement Project, Family Equality Council, and Center for American Progress (CAP)—“All Children Matter: How Legal and Social Inequalities Hurt LGBT Families”—notes that there are now an estimated 2 million children being raised in LGBT families, and they are twice as likely to be poor than children of heterosexual married couples. The average household income for LGBT families with children is 20 percent less than heterosexual couples with children. LGBT families live in 96 percent of US counties, and same-sex couples in the South are more likely to be raising children than those in other regions of the country.

“It’s true, we actually don’t just live in California, New York and DC,” says report co-author Jeff Krehely, vice president of LGBT research and communications at CAP. “We live all across the country—some of us have kids, some of us don’t. We’re all races and ethnicities, and our earnings run the gamut. We basically reflect the diversity of this country.”

Krehely says that even national advocates sometimes fail to recognize LGBT diversity, and the demographics in the South are a great example of that. He suggests that a lower cost of living combined with less social mobility for low-income families might explain why so many LGBT families remain in a region “not exactly known for being welcoming to gay people or minorities.”

“But knowing these kinds of demographics isn’t just about thinking more accurately about LGBT realities,” says Krehely. “It’s about being more effective as an advocate and realizing, for example, if we say, ‘We’re not going to get marriage equality in Mississippi or Alabama anytime soon, so we’re not going to play in those states,’ well, then we’re leaving behind a lot of people—including some of very the people who are most in need, and most in need of our advocacy.”

At the heart of the economic struggles for LGBT families rich, poor, and in between, is what the report calls the “legal stranger” issue. In contrast to a child of a heterosexual couple, a child born to (or raised by) two LGBT parents “may have one parent deemed a legal stranger by law, threatening to undercut family permanency.” These children lack protection when their parents’ relationship dissolves or a parent dies; the relationship to his or her parents will be recognized in fewer than half of all US states; fear of a parent’s deportation hangs over the heads of too many children of bi-national, same-sex couples.

“Say one parent is here on a student visa or a work visa,” says Krehely. “The visa expires—that parent could be deported, taken away from his or her kids. It’s more than just heart wrenching. If that parent is the breadwinner—the family’s economic security is at stake. This all impacts the well being of kids when there is this kind of instability in terms of emotional support, love, being taken care of and being provided for financially and materially.”

The legal stranger definition also leads to difficulties accessing the safety net since benefits depend on “legal” household size and income. Cash assistance, health insurance, child care assistance, educational loans and other forms of assistance may not be available to LGBT families due to the narrow legal definition of family. LGBT families often can’t take advantage of the Child Tax Credit or Earned Income Tax Credit—both of which have a significant anti-poverty effect and ease the financial costs of raising children. Social Security and Survivors Benefits are denied if a non-recognized parent dies, even if the children were financially dependent on the parent, and even if the parents are legally married in their state; surviving same-sex spouses are also denied benefits.

“The legal stranger issue is something that most people who don’t know much about LGBT people can relate to,” says Krehely. “Everybody gets into positions where you rely on those relationships to help a family member in need. What would happen if that just didn’t exist for you? ”

Some of the recommendations the report makes include: recognizing LGBT families across safety net programs and providing equitable treatment in the tax code; passing parental recognition laws at the state level to fully protect children in LGBT families; legalizing and federally recognizing marriage for gay and lesbian couples; creating stronger support services for LGBT families, particularly families of color, low-income and transgender parents.

Pride Month is great, but there are eleven other months in the year that require the same kind of commitment if we are going to get the work done. You can get involved with the groups that authored this report, Immigration Equality, Half in Ten, and many others. Anti-poverty advocates also can ensure that the concerns of LGBT people are addressed in their ongoing work.

“This isn’t about ‘special rights,’” says Krehely. “It’s about leveling the proverbial playing field.”

The Supreme Court and Medicaid

When I heard the news about Chief Justice John Roberts’s big surprise for America I was just as excited as the next guy. But then I read that the Court struck down the formidable stick that the legislation provided the federal government to compel states to expand Medicaid. Suddenly, a good day for most Americans seemed—as usual—like a mixed bag or worse for the poor as decisions on Medicaid expansion would be left to the states (see Pennsylvania above for implications).

I tweeted—because I try to do that just like the young folks now: “not to be a buzz kill, but I think the #Medicaid decision potentially sucks for poor people. Fed gov loses stick to compel states to expand.”

Then I did what I should have done before I tweeted (which is why I used to avoid tweeting altogether) and surveyed people who know a hell of a lot more about this stuff than I do. Here are some observations from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities for your consideration if you are still trying to figure out the implications:

“The typical state [Medicaid program] only covers working parents who make less than 63 percent of the poverty line ($12,790 a year for a family of three) and non-working parents with incomes below 37 percent of the poverty line ($7,063 a year). Only a handful of states provide coverage to any low-income adults without dependent children.… The Medicaid expansion would cover these poor and low-income adults by expanding Medicaid to 133 percent of the poverty line ($25,390 for a family of three). CBO assumed an additional 17 million adults would receive Medicaid coverage by 2022, as a result.… The federal government will bear nearly 93 percent of the costs of the Medicaid expansion over its first nine years.… Because the expansion is such a good deal for states, they should move forward and cover low-income adults in their states. But what happens in states that do not go ahead and provide coverage? The poorest adults—primarily parents and other adults working for low wages—will be left out in the cold.”
—Judy Solomon, vice president for health policy, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

“The single biggest challenge may lie in the decisions that states make regarding health coverage for uninsured people living below the poverty line—primarily working-poor parents and other adults who work for low wages.… A state would have little basis for refusing to implement the Medicaid expansion, other than for narrow ideological reasons. But in any state that does refuse to implement the expansion, a shocking inequity will arise. People with incomes between 100 percent and 400 percent of the poverty line will be eligible for subsidies to help them afford coverage in the new health insurance exchanges. But people below the poverty line will not be eligible, because the Affordable Care Act assumes they’ll be in Medicaid instead.”
—Robert Greenstein, president, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

I think it’s safe to say that a lot of work lies ahead to make sure that the poor aren’t once again cut out of a good deal.

Houston Janitors (continued)

The story of Adriana Vasquez and 3,400 fellow janitors down in Houston continues to gain traction. Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel wrote about it in her weekly column for the Washington Post, and her tweet brought the story to the attention of NPR’s Here & Now. The Matthew Filipowicz Show also gave the story quite a bit of airtime.

This Sunday, civil rights activist and actor Danny Glover will visit the city to meet privately with a delegation of janitors. They will later be joined by faith and civil rights leaders at a news conference at 2 pm (Third Ward Multi-Services Center, 3611 Ennis Street).

“It’s magnificent. It’s great that an actor like Danny Glover cares about janitors—you just don’t see that very often,” Vasquez told me. “I hope this will bring further attention to the plight of janitors and working people in Houston and across the United States.”

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Events

Welcome Home the Nuns on the Bus: Monday, July 2, 12–1 pm, United Methodist Building, 100 Maryland Avenue NE, Washington, DC. The Soul Sisters wrap up their nine-state, twenty-eight-city bus tour to call attention to the House Republican-passed Ryan budget and the damaging effects it would have on poor, vulnerable and struggling people throughout America. Help give them the welcome and thanks they deserve.

50 Years Since The Other America: Understanding & Addressing Poverty in the 21^st Century: Tuesday, July 10, 9am – 5pm, The Newseum Knight Conference Center, Washington, DC. Leading researchers, practitioners, and journalists will assess how economic and policy trends are affecting poverty today, and will discuss promising new policies and strategies for lifting and keeping Americans out of poverty.

2012 Kansas Conference on Poverty: July 25–27, Hyatt Regency, Wichita, Kansas. I’ll be there and I’m honored to be speaking. But I’m also staying for the whole shindig, because I’m going to learn a lot from the people running this show, and so can you. The Kansas Association of Community Action Programs and the Kansas Community Action Network have their fingers on the pulse of poverty and what’s happening in the anti-poverty community. Plus Deborah Weinstein, executive director of the Coalition on Human Needs, is keynoting. My opinion: through her thirty years of advocacy experience she’s pretty much like some sort of Jedi Master on all things poverty-related. It’s kinda scary.

Articles and Other Resources

“EITC Encourages Work and Success in School and Reduces Poverty,” Jimmy Charite, Indivar Dutta-Gupta, and Chuck Marr

“Children’s Share of Federal Budget Decreasing,” First Focus

“Evidence Free Policy Decisions: Driving an Epidemic,” Dr. Deborah Frank

“Homeless Families Turn to City for Help Hind No Rooms, Risk Child Welfare Inquiry,” Annie Gowen

“Women Who Don’t Have Anything Close to ‘It All’,” Katrina vanden Heuvel

“Faith Reflection on the May Jobless Numbers and Older Workers,” Interreligious Working Group on Domestic Human Needs

“Cutting Food Stamps While Giving the Sugar Lobby Billions,” Zaid Jilani

Vital Statistics

US poverty (less than $22,314 for a family of four): 46 million people, 15.1 percent of population.

Children in poverty: 16.4 million, 22 percent of all children, including 39 percent of African-American children and 35 percent of Latino children.

Number of poor children receiving cash aid: one in five.

Poverty rate for people in female-headed families: 42 percent.

Single mothers with incomes under $25,000: 50 percent.

Single mothers working: 67 percent.

Deep poverty (less than $11,157 for a family of four): 20.5 million people, 6.7 percent of population. Up from 12.6 million in 2000.

Increase in deep poverty, 1976–2010: doubled—3.3 percent of population to 6.7 percent.

Americans with no income other than food stamps: 6 million, 2 percent of population.

Twice the poverty level (less than $44,628 for a family of four): 103 million people, roughly 1 in 3 Americans.

Families receiving cash assistance, 1996: 68 for every 100 families living in poverty.

Families receiving cash assistance, 2010: 27 for every 100 families living in poverty.

Impact of public policy, 2010: without government assistance, poverty would have been twice as high—nearly 30 percent of population.

Quote of the Week

“Nothing like this in recent history.” —Pennsylvania resident and longtime advocate for children and families, on the state’s Medicaid debacle

This Week in Poverty posts every Friday morning. Please comment below. You can also e-mail me at WeekInPoverty@me.comand follow me on Twitter.