Big headline is that homelessness decreased between 2009 and 2011 — not only the overall rate, but the rates for people in families, veterans and the chronically homeless, i.e., individuals with disabilities, including mental illness and/or substance abuse disorders, who’ve been homeless for a long time or recurrently.

As I noted last year, NAEH relies, for want of an alternative, on the point-in-time counts conducted by communities that receive homelessness grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Its raw figures, therefore, understate the extent of homelessness. Gross changes, however, probably mean something, since the PIT flaws are relatively constant from year to year.

The greater limit in the headlined news is that the nationwide trends mask wide variations among states.

Figures for the District of Columbia are a good case in point. All but one buck the nationwide trends NAEH reports. This is moderately good news in one case. Bad in the rest.

Overall homelessness. In 2011, as compared to 2009, the overall nationwide homeless rate decreased 1.1%. But in the District, it increased 5.11%. Nearly half the states also experienced increases.

Homelessness among people in families. Homelessness in this population, i.e., adults and children who were together when counted, decreased 3.39% nationwide. In the District, it increased 17.8%. There were also increases in 20 states.

Chronic homelessness. The chronic homelessness rate decreased 3.39% nationwide. In the District, it increased 8.84%. Rates also went up in 18 states.

Veterans homelessness. By far and away the biggest progress here — undoubtedly due to the big push at the federal level. Nationwide, the veterans homelessness rate decreased 10.73%. Rates also decreased in 35 states.

Here the District follows the national trend, with a drop of 19.78%. But no state wound up in 2011 with nearly as high a percentage of homeless veterans in its population.

Unsheltered homelessness. Nationwide, the unsheltered homelessness rate, i.e., the percent of homeless people found on the streets or “in other places not meant for human habitation,” rose 1.64%.

But it was 4.98% lower in the District. Rates were also lower in 22 states. As with the District, however, the percentages generally reflect very small numerical changes.

So what do we make of all of this?

For NAEH, the big message is that the temporary Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program created by the Recovery Act worked.

Though nationwide homelessness rates didn’t decline much, they would surely have risen, it says, without the funds communities got for a variety of short-shot types of assistance, e.g., payment of overdue rent or a utilities bill, funds for a security deposit and/or first month’s rent.

So now that communities have exhausted their HPRP funds — or soon will — Congress should put more money into the regular homelessness grants program.

No argument from me about that.

But the state of homelessness in the District — and elsewhere — suggests that funds targeted to people who’ve lost their housing or soon will won’t be enough to end homelessness in our lifetime.

The NAEH report, in fact, indicates as much in two very interesting chapters on risk factors for future homelessness.

Too interesting to cram into this post. So I’ll leave them for another.

But without giving the plot away, I’ll say here that the risk factors point to the need for a range of investments, including funds for lots more affordable housing.

The boost was originally supposed to last until the increase was no greater than the cumulative annual increases in food price inflation. That was expected to happen no sooner than some time late in 2018.

Then came the need to extend two expiring parts of the Recovery Act that provided states with some urgently-needed fiscal relief. The bill couldn’t get through the Senate without a pay-for, i.e., some budget changes that would fully offset the costs.

The Democratic leadership ultimately decided to offset nearly half the costs by moving the end date for the food stamp boost back to April 2014.

Next things you know, there was a need to pay for the reauthorized Child Nutrition Act. And the Senate decided again to tap food stamp benefits. This time it lopped five months off the already-foreshortened boost.

The President’s proposed budget for this fiscal year would have put the five months back. But his budget was effectively dead on arrival in Congress.

So as things stand now, food stamp benefits will revert to what they’d have been if adjusted only for inflation in November 2013.

The Congressional Research Service estimates the initial per person loss at somewhere between $10 and $15 a month — an average of about 10%.

This might not seem like a lot. But as I’ve written before, food stamp benefits are egregiously low, even with the boost.

We’ve got new evidence from the U.S. Department of Agriculture itself.

In 2010, it reports, 41.5% of households that got food stamp benefits had “very low food security.” This means that at least one member of the household sometimes had to skimp on meals or skip them altogether because there wasn’t enough money for food.

Now low-income families may have to get along on considerably less. And our anemic economy may lose the biggest bang-for-the-buck stimulus we’ve got.

The Food Research and Action Center has launched a grassroots campaign to get the cut-off months restored, along with a now-expired suspension of a targeted time limit on food stamp benefits.

It has an online letter we can send to the President asking him to restore the two Recovery Act measures as part of his proposed Fiscal Year 2013 budget.

It also encourages us to weigh in with our Members of Congress.

Not much use if we live in the District of Columbia. But we disenfranchised souls can still do our bit by passing the word along to friends and relatives who live anywhere else in the U.S.

As I wrote some time ago, the exemption reflects an over-broad interpretation of a carve-out Congress made when it extended minimum wage and overtime rights to domestic workers.

That was nearly 37 years ago. So one could say the Labor Department has decided to rectify a long-standing error.

The department itself puts a somewhat different spin on its initiative. Says that home care workers today perform duties and in circumstances that weren’t envisioned when the current regulations were issued.

In any event, it’s issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking — the formal step all federal agencies must take before revising their regulations. Anyone who cares to may file comments on the proposed rule up to February 27.

And you’d better bet there will be comments. Here’s a preview of what I think we’ll see.

Support for the Rule Change

Proponents of the rule change will include organized labor and other nonprofits that advocate for low-wage workers, including home care workers specifically.

They’ll argue, as they have for some time, that home care workers deserve the proposed wage protections as “a matter of basic justice.”

They’ll note, as does the Labor Department, that home care is one of our country’s fastest growing industries. According to its projections, the number of home care aides will have nearly doubled by 2018 — from about 1.7 million to well over 2.5 million.

In short, we’ve got a large and growing group of skilled workers who are currently classified as occasional babysitters for adults.

This is bad for them — not least because it depresses their earnings to the point that some 46% live in households poor enough to qualify for public benefits like food stamps and Medicaid.

Also bad for all of us who want our loved ones — and ourselves, should the need arise — to be cared for professionally and, well, caringly.

Not surprising then to find AARP supporting the core thrust of the rule change on behalf of the older Americans it represents.

Objections to the Rule Change

We’re likely to see formal objections from some, though not all, home care agencies and the associations they belong to.

We’ve already heard from this quarter. And the concerns they raise go to the heart of the debate. It’s not the minimum wage requirement they’re so fussed about. It’s the overtime.

Home care workers already make, on average, $9.25 an hour — a very low wage for what they do, but not one that would be bumped up by coverage under the federal minimum wage rule.

But they’re entitled to overtime in only 16 states.

So for a great many, the wage stays flat, even if they spend far more than 40 hours a week actively tending to clients’ needs. And they often get no pay at all for the time they spend traveling from one client’s home to the next.

Some opponents of the rule change purport to have their interests at heart. Laurie Edwards-Tate, for example, warns that home care workers will earn less because agencies like hers will cut hours back to eight-hour shifts.

Also warns that thousands will be put out of work. The thought here seems to be that agencies will shrink or fold because third-party payers won’t increase reimbursement rates to cover the overtime costs.

But opponents, including Edwards-Tate, focus mostly on harms to seniors and others with disabilities.

“The cost of overtime especially will make in-home non-medical care unaffordable for many, if not most, of the seniors and persons with disabilities we serve,” she says. Dire consequences predicted, including costly, taxpayer-funded institutional care and risks of elder abuse.

“The companionship exemption is a significant factor in helping to keep paid, senior caregiving affordable,” says another home care company president. It “helps seniors protect their assets while receiving the right amount of care.”

This isn’t, I think, an entirely self-serving argument.

Mandatory overtime compensation could increase home care costs, though the Labor Department thinks it’s likely that employers will adjust shifts to eliminate or at least minimize the extra hours.

The first scenario could create more home care jobs, though perhaps also reduce wages for workers who are currently putting in as many as 80 hours a week.

The second would drive up home care costs and/or the already high costs of long-term care insurance. By how much is purely speculative.

For some low-income people, mandatory overtime could mean loss of Medicaid-funded home care — either because states that haven’t had to deal with overtime decide to scale back services or because they won’t reimburse for the additional costs.

In the latter case, agencies refuse to serve Medicaid beneficiaries, as some doctors already do.

Still, I think it’s fundamentally wrong to exclude home care workers from basic labor protections because we’ve got an unresolved — and growing — social problem.

We might as well say the affordable housing shortage justifies exempting construction workers from the minimum wage.

This is an important, timely post because it reminds us of how poor people lived — and died — before the creation of today’s safety net.

Here in the District of Columbia, Morgan found “people living in basement apartments with dirt floors. Many were hungry, cold and short of coal for stoves. Some children were staying home because they had no shoes.”

Found a penniless woman with no coat to brave the cold weather for a trip to the social service agency. A blind man who made the trip, but was living with his nine children in an unheated place because the agency wouldn’t — or couldn’t — help him buy fuel.

In California, Morgan met a family that had lost three babies to dehydration while picking cotton there in 1936.

Still dreadful conditions 20 years later, he writes, when Michael Harrington chronicled farm worker poverty in that agriculture-rich state.

Morgan cites some evidence that safety net programs have lifted Americans out of poverty.

For example, the official poverty rate for seniors dropped from 28.5% in 1966 to 9% in 2010, at least partly because the federal government started indexing Social Security retirement benefits to cost-of-living increases.

Two other examples based on the Census Bureau’s supplemental poverty measure. You can see them in this nice infographic from the Half in Ten campaign.

But Morgan’s main point is that safety net programs have changed the quality of poverty.

In other words, poor people, by and large, don’t suffer the same acute, life-threatening deprivations as they did before we began building the network of programs that make up today’s safety net.

Morgan focuses on what may be our biggest success — federal nutrition assistance programs.

“Clinical malnutrition,” he writes, “has given way to what government and private agencies call ‘food insecurity.’”

“Poor nutrition, not malnutrition is the biggest problem” now, says anti-hunger expert and advocate Joel Berg.

And indeed, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2010 figures, children in only 1% of American households sometimes didn’t get enough to eat because their parents couldn’t afford to feed them.

WIC alone, Berg estimates, has prevented 200,000 babies from dying at birth.

“Progressives,” Morgan concludes, “should not be timid about extolling this achievement. And conservatives, above all, should welcome it” because safety net programs “enable millions more people to participate in the great American market,” e.g., by using food stamps to buy groceries, vouchers to pay rent to private landlords.

Many conservatives do appreciate the safety net, Morgan says. But, even by his own showing, many don’t.

For example, he quotes Newt Gingrich, whose latest tome notes that the 2009 poverty rate was about the same as when the War on Poverty began. “What did we get in return?” Newt asks — a rhetorical question if ever there was one.

We hear the same thing from the Republican Study Committee, which counts a large majority of House Republicans as members.

“Americans have spent around $16 trillion on means-tested welfare,”* it says. “Even with all these resources devoted to assistance for the poor, poverty is higher today than it was in the 1970s.”

This is the send-up for its broad-gauge attack on virtually the whole range of federal programs that constitute the safety net.

And RSC member Paul Ryan, who chairs the influential House Budget Committee, has personally championed radical safety net cuts.

As we head into the Fiscal Year 2013 budget season, both the administration and Congress will be looking for ways to reduce non-defense spending by $54.7 billion.

“The safety net will be a fat target,” Morgan warns.

Some major programs won’t get hit by the automatic cuts the failure of the Super Committee will trigger. But that doesn’t mean they’re safe, since Congress is perfectly free to change them — or the law that partly protects them.

Other programs are wide open, as the Congressional committees and subcommittees parcel out the mandated reductions.

We often focus on defects in the safety net — people who aren’t served, people who are but not sufficiently. This is still important.

But, taking a leaf out of Morgan’s book, I feel we urgently need to show how much good safety net programs do — and to revive the history of what poverty in America was like before them.

* This figure comes from the arch-conservative Heritage Foundation — a not always reliable source. The RSC is also indebted to the Foundation for its uniquely expansive definition of “welfare”.

The bill they’ve passed will also extend other legislation — but again, only for two months. So there’s more hinging on the House-Senate negotiations than the two items that have been getting the headlines.

And that, I think, means the Republicans have more bargaining chips — or to switch metaphors, hostages — than some of us realize.

One of them is the “doc fix,” i.e., the annual tweak to existing law that keeps Medicare reimbursements to physicians from dropping as they would if a cost-control measure adopted long ago took effect.

That you probably know about, since it’s already gotten major press coverage.

Not so for some about-to-expire programs for low-income individuals and families. I’ve heard barely a peep about these, except from advocacy organizations.

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families

I already knew TANF was expiring — though I confess that wasn’t at the forefront of my consciousness when the proverbial hit the fan in mid-December.

As I’d nervously noted back in October, Congress passed only a three-month, pared-back extension. Now TANF has a lease on life until March.

But it’s at risk, I think, of further cost-cutting and/or some “reforms” that achieve the same thing through the back door.

The big sticking point, after all, is how to come up with offsets equal to the cost of the extensions. The House Republicans’ Welfare Reform Act may be a preview of what they’ll push for.

Other Programs for Low-Income People

I didn’t know that other programs were expiring — and thus now also have just two months of official life. Maybe you didn’t either. So a brief introduction to these hostages.

One of the programs provides a funding stream for the Child Care and Development Fund — a major source of the funds states use to subsidize child care for low-income parents.

The Fund also ensures states invest in helping these parents find child care and in improving the quality of care their children receive.

Two other just-extended programs partially cover health care costs.

One provides funding for transitional Medicaid assistance so that TANF families continue to have affordable health insurance as they transition from dependence on cash assistance to gainful employment.

The other pays the Medicare Part B premiums for “qualified individuals,” i.e., some low-income seniors who have a bit too much to be eligible for Medicaid.

The premium cost for most seniors this year will be $99.90 per month — automatically deducted from their Social Security benefits.

A big bite for QI-eligible seniors, whose incomes barely top 150% of the federal poverty line.

But without Part B, they’d have no insurance coverage for outpatient medical care, home health care services or “durable medical equipment,” e.g., wheelchairs, walkers, oxygen tanks.

Looking Forward

All four of the above programs have bipartisan support. Even a lot of far-right Republicans voted to keep them going, since they were part of the original House payroll tax cut/UI extension bill.

So we can be quite certain they won’t die. Nor indeed, will TANF. But the very fact the Democrats care about them gives the Republicans leverage.

We can thus expect the Republican negotiators to use them as trade-offs for some very problematic parts of the House year-long extension bill — or at least, try to use them that way.

I’m not clear what leverage the Democrats have — besides another upsurge of public outrage and a potential for campaign messaging.

These worked last month, but the string of crisis situations we’ve experienced shows that ransoms do get paid.

Sigh of relief, therefore, but also breath-holding in this quarter.

NOTE: I’m indebted to the Coalition on Human Needs for alerting me to the broader implications of the extensions stalemate and to its Executive Director, Deborah Weinstein, for help with particulars. I’m solely responsible for the political perspective and for any errors here.

For the first time in at least four years, the District of Columbia is represented in the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ annual report on hunger and homelessness in America’s cities.

We learn some interesting — and disturbing — things about hunger in the District. We’ve already gotten more detailed (and more accurate) information on local homelessness.*

So here’s about hunger, with some prefatory remarks to put the figures in perspective.

About the Survey

The reported figures reflect the District’s responses to a survey that the Conference distributes to all cities represented on its hunger and homelessness task force.

This year, 29 cities responded — some very large, some quite small. And some very large cities, e.g., Miami and New York City, absent.

I mention this because, as the report acknowledges, the survey results aren’t necessarily representative of conditions nationwide — not even those in the Conference’s 1,139 members.

They do, however, provide some context for what the District reported about needs for emergency food assistance, i.e., requests for take-home foods at local pantries and meals at dining rooms for low-income residents.

These are how the survey measures hunger — another reason we should be cautious about conclusions.

Key Figures

Between September 1, 2010 and August 31, 2011:

• Requests for emergency food assistance in the District increased 24%.
• This is 8.5% higher than the average increase for the 25 other cities that provided a figure. The average, however, masks a huge variation — from a 40% increase in Kansas City to an 11% decrease in San Francisco.
• Of the people requesting assistance from District sources, 45% were elderly, 40% were in families and 30% were employed.
• For all responding cities, the average for the elderly was just 19% — and this includes the egregiously high percent in the District. Averages for families and employed people were respectively 51% and 26%.
• Local food pantries and dining rooms were unable to meet 72% of the demand for emergency food assistance. They reportedly had to turn people away, cut back on the amount of food they distributed or served and/or reduce the number of times people could visit each month.
• The average for the 13 other cities that could estimate unmet need was slightly under 24%.
• Yet the District reported a 25% increase in the number of pounds of food distributed — 30 million in all.
• The increase was the highest reported. However, nine cities reported more pounds of distributed food, including two considerably smaller than D.C.
• The District’s emergency food assistance budget, as reported, increased to $14 million — up by 17%. This reflects funds from both public and private sources, but not the dollar value of food donations, assuming survey directions were followed.
• The median average for reported budgets was about $3.8 million, but the range is so large that I doubt all cities calculated the same way.

Prospects for 2012

The District expects requests for emergency food assistance to increase substantially in 2012, as do nine of the other reporting cities.

It also expects resources to decrease substantially. Eleven other cities do as well, while an additional 11 expect moderate decreases.

Hard to know what to make of these diverse projections. We do, however, know that the District has its eye on Capitol Hill.

The biggest challenges it cites are all cuts in federal support for safety net programs — namely, but perhaps not only the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, WIC and the food stamp program.

These programs fared better than one might have expected, especially given what the House Republican majority had passed. So did the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), which a number of surveyed cities were concerned about.

Yet the figures the District reported suggest large unmet challenges with the funding and other resources now available.

Are our local nonprofits — and the Capital Area Food Bank, which helps supply them — really unable to meet even a third of emergency food needs?

* The District reported that “homeless shelters did not turn away homeless families.” This may be technically true because homeless families generally have to seek shelter through an intake center. But even the DC Department of Human Services acknowledges that homeless families were denied shelter, even if they had no place to stay.

UPDATE: The Conference of Mayors’ report identifies the Capital Area Food Bank as a primary contact for the District’s figures on emergency food assistance. Page Dohl Crosland, Senior Director for Marketing and Communications at CAFB, has informed me that the unmet need figure is inaccurate.

CAFB provided the Gray administration with figures, but they were generally for the entire Washington Metro area. Someone apparently misinterpreted the numbers it put in the unmet need part of the survey form. CAFB estimates the unmet need for the Metro area as a whole at 25%.

As I’ve mentioned before, TANF is overdue for reauthorization, i.e., a thoroughgoing review and revision of the law that allows the federal government to spend money on the program and establishes its basic rules.

The Women for Economic Justice coalition organized the Hill briefing in part to change the “narrative” about single moms — this, I infer, because a fact-based view of their needs, ambitions and potential could lead to a better law than the one that’s been shredding the safety net since 1996.

If the five women who spoke can’t do it, I can’t imagine who could.

Stories of personal hardships — and mistakes — overcome by courage, smarts, energy and fierce determination to make life better for themselves and their children.

I’d expected them to address various issues often raised about TANF — woefully insufficient cash benefits, arbitrary sanctions, time limits, pressure to immediately get a job — any job, no matter how bad the fit and the pay.

And, indeed, we heard about some of these. But we heard most about educational opportunity — in some cases, how TANF had made higher education possible, in others how it thwarted college ambitions.

Magali, for example, was brought to the U.S. from Mexico when she was ten. She started working at thirteen because her mother couldn’t make enough to support them.

She married a man she thought was her “prince,” but found out was a life-threatening “monster.” For a long time, she felt she “had to keep quiet” because she depended on him for everything, including her tenuous immigration status.

But she ultimately fled with her children and wound up on TANF.

Given the opportunity, she passed the GED tests in a month. Then her local agency let her go to a community college rather than take a low-paying job — “gave her wings,” she said. Now she’s completing a degree at UCLA.

Rasheeda almost dropped out of high school after giving birth to her daughter. But she graduated with honors and went on to Temple University, where she completed a bachelors degree (with high honors) in three years and then a law degree.

With promise like that, it’s not surprising that she got scholarships and grants. The university provided housing for both her and her child. But without TANF cash assistance, she wouldn’t have had enough for their other basic living expenses.

Now she’s an attorney at a nonprofit legal services organization, where she represents and counsels low-income child care providers, “thereby increasing their economic stability and creating resources in the community” for low-income parents.

These are clearly exceptional women. And they seem to have had exceptionally good luck with TANF. Chalk this up partly to their state programs and partly, I would guess, to their caseworkers.

But we need to understand that the federal law severely restricts access to higher education and creates unique hurdles for those permitted to enroll.

Mary referred to some of them when she talked about her current experience with TANF.

She’d enrolled in the program when her first child was born, but then spent many years independently supporting herself and her family.

She returned to TANF fairly recently — one of the millions fired when the recession set in.

She wants to go back to school, thinking that a college education will improve her prospects in the job market. But TANF, she says, “allows only certain tracks.”

Specifically, she can enroll only in a program that qualifies as vocational education — unless, of course, she wants to pursue her studies while also putting in 30 hours a week in approved work-related activities.

Even with this restriction, she may or may not get work-activity credit for coursework. Under federal law, states can grant such credit to no more than 30% of their TANF participants — and then for only one year.

After that, studies can count for only part of a participant’s obligation. So Mary will have to put in 20 hours a week on other work activities — in addition to the time she’ll spend in classes and all but a fraction of  “unsupervised” homework.

This, of course, assumes she can get subsidized child care. Torrie was told she couldn’t if college was what she had in mind.

TANF is supposed to “end the dependency of needy parents.” Everything we know about the labor market tells us that postsecondary education is the best bet for doing that.

What sense does it make to impose artificial limits on college access? What sense to make successful completion more difficult for TANF parents than their better-off peers?

Questions one hopes our federal policymakers will ponder. And they might if they’d just get out of their ideological boxes and listen to real “welfare” moms.

By the time the temporary extension expires, workers in 11 states will have lost their benefits, he writes, even though they won’t have reached the maximum they’d have been entitled to in early December.

This isn’t because the Senate leaders who negotiated the bill changed the law. It’s because they didn’t.

Here’s the situation, as best I can summarize it, with help from a somewhat outdated, but still useful brief by the National Employment Law Project.

Under federal law, states can establish an Extended Benefits program to provide jobless workers with extra weeks of benefits during times of unusually high unemployment.

What’s unusually high can be measured in one of two ways. Most states and the District of Columbia have chosen what’s called the total unemployment rate.

The TUR is the most recent three-month average of the state’s regular unemployment rates as compared to the average for the comparable period during a prior year.

For a state to “trigger on” to the EB program, the current three-month average must be at least 6.5% higher than during the base-year period. That provides 13 extra weeks of UI benefits. A 10% higher average provides 20 weeks.

By the same token, a state “triggers off” the program when its three-month average isn’t sufficiently higher than during the comparable period. A state can thus “trigger off” when its unemployment rate is still very high.

Ordinarily, the federal government pays half the costs of extended benefits, and states pay the other half. The Recovery Act made the federal government temporarily responsible for the full costs.

When Congress extended the EB funding provision in 2010, it also gave states the option of changing the “look back,” i.e., the year their current unemployment rate would be compared to.

Instead of the usual one or two, they could have a three-year “look back.” This, of course, was in recognition of the long duration of high unemployment rates in a great many states.

Thirty-two states and the District of Columbia adopted the three-year “look back.” But now that’s not enough to keep states from triggering off, even though their unemployment rates are considerably higher than normal.

When that happens, workers who’ve been jobless long enough to get to the EB stage will get no more benefits. Other workers who reach that stage will also be in the same straits as the so-called 99ers are now.

So the EB provision needs another fix like the one Congress made last time. And the temporary extension law doesn’t have it.

Delaney reports that some House Democrats wanted it, but felt they had to give way to get any extension passed. “That’s the process,” said Congressman Steny Hoyer, the second highest-ranking member of their leadership team.

However, it’s also true that the President’s jobs bill didn’t change the “look back” either. So in this respect, Republicans are right when they say their plan resembles parts of his.

The Democrats could still insist on a straightforward four-year look back as part of the year-long extension package. But it’s doubtful they will.

Too many other issues — including the highly-controversial pay-for, i.e., how to extend all the measures in the package without increasing the near-term deficit.

Advocates reportedly hope for some split-the-difference compromise. Perhaps a waiver from the standard TUR trigger-off for states with double digit unemployment rates.

There aren’t all that many of them, however. Could be fewer as the months roll on.

So it looks as if many long-term jobless workers will be out of luck, even if the EB trigger language gets a partial fix.

But I hope I’m wrong.

We’ve got more than enough people falling into poverty without a pennywise-pound foolish decision to cut off a relatively small cash flow to workers who are still trying to beat the worse than 4-1 odds of finding another job.

No surprise to anyone that the poverty rate rose last year — even when measured by the very low poverty thresholds based on food costs.

More notable perhaps were the increases found when the Census Bureau used its new supplemental poverty measure.

But everyone, I think, knows that poverty rates give us an incomplete picture of how low-income people in the U.S. get along — or don’t — financially.

Three recent reports round out the poverty rates with data on economic insecurity — defined by each in a different way. Brief recap follows.

Census Report for the New York Times

The New York Times asked the Census Bureau to use its supplemental measure for an analysis that captured the number of people with incomes above the poverty threshold, but by only 50%.

Turns out that there are 51 million Americans in what the Times reporters call “the fretful zone,” where one untoward event can mean a plunge into what we officially define as poverty.

Adding the poor and “near poor” together, we find that nearly a third of the U.S. population is economically insecure.

Wider Opportunities for Women

Wider Opportunities for Women provides a much more detailed analysis of people who are “living below the line” that represents economic security.

The measure here is one that WOW has developed in collaboration with the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis — the Basic Economic Security Tables (BEST) Index.

Basically, the index pulls together basic living costs, including work-related expenses like child care, and adds some savings for both emergencies and retirement.

These, needless to say, are different for different family configurations — number of workers in the household, number of children (if any), their ages. The index adjusts accordingly.

The WOW analysts slice and dice the population to show us discrete results for some configurations and also for some major racial and ethnic groups. We thus get a fairly complex picture of who lacks “financial stability.”

Bottom line is that 45% of people in the U.S. live in households that do. This figure comprises 39% of all adults and a very disturbing 55% of all children.

For single women, the economic insecurity rate rises to 62%. For African-American and Hispanic women, to 76% and 80% respectively.

These, as WOW acknowledges, are conservative figures because the index doesn’t include items that many families would consider essential — “commonplace” purchases like gifts and home electronics or big-ticket investments like sending a child to college.

The rates are still plenty high enough to give anyone pause — especially now when programs that shore up below-the-line budgets are so vulnerable to further spending cuts.

Economic Security Index

We get a third, lower estimate from a research team headed by Yale Professor Jacob Hacker. They’ve developed what they call the Economic Security Index, though it actually measures economic insecurity.

People count as economically insecure if they meet two basic conditions.

• Between one year and the next, they lost at least 25% of their inflation-adjusted household income, less out-of-pocket medical costs — because they made less, had higher medical expenses or both.
• They didn’t have enough “liquid assets,” e.g., money in a bank account of mutual fund, to make up the difference.

The latest ESI report projects long-term figures — mainly from the Census Bureau — forward to 2009.

End result is an estimated 20.4% of Americans who experienced economic insecurity that year.

Note, however, that these are only people who suffered a major economic loss. People too poor to make ends meet don’t get into the estimate unless they were significantly better off the year before.

Still, it’s notable that Americans in the bottom fifth of the income scale register highest on the multi-year ESI — nearly double the rate of the top fifth for the 10-year period preceding our Great Recession.

Same for groups that have disproportionately high poverty rates — African-Americans, Hispanics, single-parent families and people who didn’t graduate from high school.

The report doesn’t have much to say about this.

But I think it’s fair to guess that people who are making barely enough to cover their household’s basic needs — if that — can’t afford to sock away a stash for the rainy days that come, even when the economy is booming along.

For awhile, I sent things they wouldn’t know they wanted. But I knew this was a crapshoot — as would anyone who’d gotten some of the gifts I have. (No, brothers and sisters-in-law, I’m not referring to yours.)

About five years ago, I decided to instead donate in my family’s names to nonprofits whose work means a lot to me. And now, like other last-minute shoppers, I’ve got to choose.

My e-mail box has been full of holiday appeals from nonprofits whose mailing lists I’ve gotten onto in various ways. So all I need to do is click. But for which?

On the one hand, I feel impoverished. There’s no way I could give to all the nonprofits that I know are doing worthy work in this world.

On the other hand, the plethora of choices makes me feel rich — not, of course, monetarily, but in hope. And, frankly, that’s a commodity I need these days.

I’m continually buoyed up by the sheer number of organizations that are addressing the critical needs of low-income people here in the U.S. — as direct service providers, advocates and both.

I’m buoyed up by how they stay buoyed up enough to keep at it. So many dreadful personal situations the service providers encounter every day. So many defeats on so many policy fronts.

And I’m buoyed up when these organizations work together — both through formal coalitions and through linkages formed for some specific cause. I’ve seen these collaborations overcome high odds.

We’ve got networks stretching across the country — and within some states and cities as well. They can — and do — reach out to engage communities most directly affected by the policies we have and might have, for better or worse.

There’s a wealth of energy, compassion, intelligence and just plain true grit in these organizations and the struggling people they represent. I’m constantly impressed by what they do — and how much they do with what are in many cases quite limited resources.

So as I mull over my gift list, I think how the people who staff and volunteer for these organizations are giving every day. And how they are a gift to us all and to me personally.

Because they’re inspiration and a ray of hope in what we all, I think, agree are very difficult times.