Dayton
Daily News...
Editorial: New
poverty numbers even worse than you might think
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
For as long as poverty statistics have been kept, people have debated
their value. What is real poverty? Should government benefits be
counted in deciding whether people are in poverty? What is the point of
having one poverty standard — X number of dollars per year for a family
of a certain size — when we know that the cost of living differs from
one place to another?
The Ohio Association of Community Action Agencies participates in a
project that accepts the legitimacy of such questions.
(Community action agencies — set up under federal law — are local
non-profits that run various programs designed to help the poor.)
The association distributes the Ohio version of a report done by Diana
Pearce of the University of Washington’s Center for Women’s Welfare.
The center does reports for 37 states.
“The Self-Sufficiency Standard for Ohio 2011,” asks this question: How
much money does a family of a particular size and type, living in a
particular place, need to stay off of public or private aid?
The author emphasizes that her budgets don’t allow for non-essentials —
no cable television, fast-food meals or vacations. However, child-care
costs are included. (The study is explained at
selfsufficiencystandard.org.)
The report gets into real life enough to report this:
“The annual amount needed to make ends meet for a family with one
adult, one preschooler, and one school-age child varies from $31,412
per year in Darke County to $49,632 in Warren County.”
The community action agencies also put out their own report on poverty,
as defined by the federal government: “The State of Poverty in Ohio: A
Path to Recovery.” Combined, the two reports offer a striking fix on
things.
Ohio’s official poverty rate in 2009, 15.2 percent, was up dramatically
from 1999, when it dipped below 10 percent. However, the rate is
similar to the 1994 rate.
That is, all the gains of the boom years of the last half of the 1990s
are gone.
Also gone are gains of the boom of the last half of the 1980s, when the
rate dipped below 11 percent after a rise.
That’s been the pattern: The country goes through a period of strong
economic growth, and the poverty rate goes down; then the down phase of
the economic cycle arrives, and it’s back to square one.
In the past decade, the number of Ohioans who are poor grew by a
staggering 46.1 percent, to 539,000 people, while the state’s
population was pretty stagnant. Montgomery County, generally typical of
urban counties, and not really all that different from some non-urban
counties, went from an 11.3 percent rate to 16.2 percent. Greene County
went from 8.5 percent to 12.3 percent.
Now look at the self-sufficiency study. It says that Ohioans need 170
percent to 270 percent of the official poverty-level income to take
care of themselves. The study puts about a third of all Ohioans, 3.7
million, below the self-sufficiency level. Quite a number.
About 2 million Ohioans are between the poverty and self-sufficiency
levels.
The self-sufficiency figures shine a light on the importance of
government help, charity and extended families. Turns out, the people
who need help are not an exception to the rule.
Meanwhile, the official poverty trends shine a light on the importance
of the general economy.
Though poverty is strikingly concentrated in single-parent households
(with 43.6 of those with a female head living below the official
poverty level), the changes over time show that there’s nothing
inevitable about any given rate for any demographic group.
Bad things have come together seemingly all at once: jobs have
disappeared; wages have shrunk; governments have cut back.
The people who have been hurt most have been those who were already
hurting the most. And the effects have not been marginal, but dramatic.
Read it at the Dayton Daily News
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