Mixed News on Progress Toward Poverty Reduction and Shared Prosperity

A year ago, the Half in Ten campaign restarted the clock for cutting poverty in half in 10 years.

As I wrote at the time, it also expanded the goal to include growing a more inclusive and economically secure middle class. It set three top priorities for achieving this — each fleshed out in specific strategies.

Half in Ten established indicators to measure progress (or lack thereof) toward both the poverty reduction and new priority goals.

The first set of figures — mostly 2010 data — were the baseline. Now we’ve got a first year’s worth of updates.

So how are we doing? Not easy to answer within the compass of a blog post.

The full report includes 21 indicators — some new and some reflecting fairly old data because sources either haven’t been updated or lag behind even Half in Ten’s base year.

Half in Ten has a summary of the full set. Also a handful of indicators online.

I’d planned to plow through the online set, using last year’s report for baselines.* But I felt I was losing the forest in the trees. Some of the more interesting indicators too.

A different approach, therefore.

Poverty Reduction

No progress here, as you probably already know. Both the official poverty rate and the somewhat higher rate based on the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure were essentially flat for the two-year period.

Meanwhile, income inequality increased. In 2011, the richest 5% of households got 22.3% of all earnings. The bottom two-fifths got just over half as much — 11.6%.

Good Jobs

Some of the indicators in this group don’t speak to the goodness of jobs, but rather to the issue of whether people have jobs at all.

Generally progress there — except for people with disabilities, whose employment rate dropped from 28.6% to 27%.

More consistent progress on indicators reflecting the employment prospects of young people. For example, the percent of high school freshmen who graduated in four years had increased, as of the 2008-9 school year.

But when we turn to workers in low-wage occupations, we see a partial explanation for the widening income gap.

For full-time workers in service occupations, median annual earnings were just $24,300 — less than $2,000 over the poverty line for a family of four. There’s been no real dollar increase for them since 2000.

Lack of paid sick leave is one — though far from the only — factor depressing yearly earnings for low-wage workers.

In 2011, only 36% of workers earning no more than $11.13 per hour, i.e., slightly below the median or less, had any paid sick leave benefit. This is 4% less than in 2010, suggesting that a lot of not-good jobs got worse.

Strong Families and Communities

Most indicators in this group relate to the current and prospective well-being of children and young adults. And they all moved in the right direction in 2011.

We see, for example, that the teen birth rate continued its downward slide, reaching a record low of 31.3 births for every thousand women in the 15-19 age bracket.

And the percent of people without health insurance dropped from 16.3% to 15.7%. We can credit this to the initial impacts of the Affordable Care Act, Half in Ten says.

Economic Security

End of moderately good news. Only one indicator — food insecurity — remained relatively flat. And even that increased from 14.5% of households in 2010 to 14.9% in 2011.

The percent of jobless workers who received unemployment benefits dropped by 10% to just over half.

Low-wage workers faced a growing affordable housing shortage. In 2010, there were only 58 affordable units available for every 100 very low-income renter households. This is four fewer than in 2009.

No relatively current figures for asset poverty, i.e., less in savings and other cash sources than a family would need to live at or above the poverty line if it had no income stream for three months.

What we know from the indicator is that the percent of asset-poor households increased by 4% between 2006 and 2009, leaving somewhat over 27% of all households at high risk of poverty.

What Will Next Year’s Indicators Show?

Congress has already decided that the unemployment benefits indicator will worsen — unless prospects for long-term job seekers dramatically improve.

It seems on the brink of deciding to let the food insecurity rate rise, since both the House and Senate Farm Bills would cut benefits for half a million households.

But the fate of most indicators — and the people whose lives underlie them — depend on what sort of bargain Republicans and Democrats strike to address the misnamed fiscal cliff.

Half in Ten offers “the right choices” for them — which, of course, are very different from the choices of the right.

* The 2010 figures are supposed to be accessible online. They weren’t when I published this, but I’m told the web tech team is working on a fix.

How Does DC Rank On Poverty, Opportunity And Shared Prosperity?

As I recently wrote, the Half in Ten campaign has issued a groundbreaking report that calls on our nation to do two related things:

• Cut poverty in half
• Create shared prosperity by increasing opportunities and supports for low-income individuals and families

For both goals, the timeframe is 10 years — less actually, since the report starts the clock running in 2010. That’s because many of the baseline indicators it uses come from the latest Census Bureau reports.

One of the most ambitious aspects of the project are the state-level indicators for both poverty reduction and progress toward the three big priorities the campaign advocates — more good jobs, stronger families and greater economic security.

The state-level indicators are online and include not only the most current figures, but rankings relative to other states. Links let us see the actual figures for all states.

So what do we learn about poverty, opportunity and shared prosperity in the District of Columbia? Here’s a sample.

Reducing Poverty

About poverty, most of us already know. The District has a higher poverty rate than all but two states — 19.2% in 2010.*

No news about food insecurity either. As I previously wrote, the District’s food insecurity rate last year was 13%. This puts the District above a majority of states, with a ranking of 20.

Creating Good Jobs

The indicators for creating good jobs are a mixed bag indeed.

On the one hand, the District tops all states for wage equity between men and women — an average of only 8.6 cents on the dollar separating them, as compared to 21.4 cents nationwide.

It also ranks first in the percent of young adults (25-34 year olds) with an associates degree or higher. Close to two-thirds — 63.6% — of residents in this age group have a college degree of some sort.

But only one state — Nevada — ranks lower in the percent of high school freshmen who graduate four years later. Barely more than half — 56% — of District students graduated on time in 2008.

Strengthening Families

Huge variations in the indicators for this priority as well.

Only one state — Massachusetts — has a lower percent of residents without health insurance. For D.C., the figure is 7.6% — just 3.2% higher than for Massachusetts.

But no state has as high a rate of children under 18 in foster care. No state, in fact, even comes close.

For every 100,000 children in the District, 2,058 have been taken away from their families. In the highest ranking state — Nebraska — the ratio is 1,188 per 100,000. Nationwide, the ratio is 533 per 100,000.

Promoting Economic Security

No big point spreads here, alas.

Last year, only 36.3% of jobless workers in the District received unemployment insurance benefits, putting the District below all but two states — South Dakota and Virginia.

The District also ranks below all but two states in the percent of residents (adults presumably) who don’t have bank accounts — a somewhat primitive, but useful measure for asset building.

Finally — no surprise — the District ranks lower than all but six states for affordable housing, which is here measured as the number of affordable, available rental units per 100 tenants with incomes at or below 50% of the state median.

Only 53% of lower-income tenants here have a chance at an affordable unit.

Why the Indicators?

Half in Ten provides these indicators — and plans updates — so that we can advocate for legislation that “moves … [them] in the right direction” and hold our elected officials accountable for progress.

The campaign focuses mainly on federal policies. Yet when we look at the District’s indicators, we can see that some of them have solutions close to home.

Many, I think, speak to the yawning gulf between the haves and have-nots in our city.

New evidence of this — and another indicator — from the Census Bureau, which reports greater income inequality in the District than in all but two other major cities.

That’s something our local government can address, though we need radical shifts in federal priorities too.

As at the federal level, the core issue is political will. Creating and sustaining it is our business.

Think what could happen if we all asked our policymakers — and aspiring policymakers — what they intended to do about the deplorable numbers here.

* This figure comes from the American Community Survey. As I earlier wrote, it is more reliable than the much-reported one-year figure from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey.

Cut Poverty In America In Half? New Report Shows How, Tells Why

A new report from the Half in Ten campaign takes on one of the biggest challenges of our time — how to significantly reduce poverty in America.

The challenge it addresses is actually even bigger. It envisions not merely lifting many millions of people above the poverty line, but expanding opportunity so as to grow a stronger middle class.

To this end, the report establishes three priorities for the next 10 years:

• Create more good jobs, i.e., jobs that pay “at least a moderate income” and provide paid time off, plus health care and retirement benefits
• Strengthen families and communities so that “all families … can raise their children in safe, healthful environments”
• Promote family economic security by strengthening both work supports and the safety net for people who aren’t employed and also by facilitating asset building

Separate chapters for each of these, with trend analyses, recommended strategies and many, many data points. A real gold mine for advocates here.

Groundbreaking Indicators

What’s truly groundbreaking are the indicators linked to the goals. Two sets of these.

The first are benchmarks for measuring progress in poverty reduction. They include data from both the Census Bureau’s official poverty measure and the much better “supplemental measure” it’s about to issue.

Also included are some more targeted indicators from the Census reports. These will give us two perspectives on public policies.

On the one hand, we’ll see how many people were kept out of poverty by the Earned Income Tax Credit and some key public benefits.

On the other hand, we’ll see how many people fell below the poverty line due to cost burdens public policies could more effectively address, e.g., health care and child care costs.

Rounding out these indicators is the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s overall food insecurity figure. This broadens the set from poverty per se to one of the major hardships it commonly imposes.

The second set of indicators are for the three top-level priorities. A total of 17 of these — eight for jobs, four for families and five for economic security.

At least some of them will be tracked not only nationwide, but for each state and the District of Columbia. An interactive map gives us baseline state-level priority indicators, plus two state-level indicators from the priority/hardship set.

In short, we’ve got an enormously ambitious agenda here — not only what’s amply laid out in the report itself, but in the commitment to tracking.

The report starts the clock, with indicators from 2010.

Going forward, we’ll have annual figures that show progress, if any, toward half as much poverty in 2020 — 23.1 million fewer Americans so poor as to fall below the poverty line. Also progress along the pathway to shared prosperity that’s mapped by the strategies.

Political Will

The leaders of the three nonprofits that founded Half in Ten say the goal is achievable. We have the knowledge and the resources — deficit hysterics notwithstanding.

We know from past experience that sensible strategies, backed by strong leadership and adequate funding, can make a big dent in the poverty rate and build a more robust, diverse middle class.

But why, with everything else going on, should we as a nation commit to such strategies now?

Half in Ten answers that they’re in our national interest because they’ll drive economic growth and long-term competitiveness in the global marketplace.

They’ll also, it says, restore trust in basic national values like the belief that hard work pays off — what we sometimes call the American Dream. Tamp down what seem to be some stirrings of social instability too, I think.

What we need — and clearly don’t have — is the political will to embrace the challenges of creating a pathway to prosperity for the poor and near-poor in our society.

Creating that will is our collective responsibility. The Half in Ten report gives strategies we can advocate, with facts and figures to support them. The ongoing tracking will help us hold our elected officials accountable.

Most important perhaps is the basic message. “It doesn’t have to be this way.”

Illinois Commission Frames Poverty As Human Rights Issue

In mid-December, the Illinois Commission on the Elimination of Poverty released a strategy for cutting the state’s extreme poverty rate in half by 2015. Extreme poverty here means, as it usually does, living below 50% of the federal poverty line.

I find a couple of things about this strategy interesting.

One is the fact that it exists at all. Because it’s not an agenda some nonprofit organization developed. The commission is an official entity established by the state legislature to do exactly what it’s done.

Not only that, but established when the recession was well under way, by a unanimous vote in both the House and the Senate. This could provoke either hope or skepticism. Inclining to the former, I think it suggests that Republicans and Democrats alike felt the need for a road map.

And they’ve got one. A year-by-year plan, phasing in a total of 42 recommendations in seven major areas.

We who live in the District know that strategies don’t necessarily guide policy decisions. Witness our strategy for ending homelessness by 2014.

Nevertheless, I think Illinois may be better off for having a holistic view of its poverty problem and how to address it — as indeed would the District and other jurisdictions.

A second interesting thing is how the commission approached its task. From the outset, it established three types of recommendations it would produce, each corresponding to a sector of the state’s very poor population.

As we might expect, there are recommendations for working-age adults who need more education and training to get jobs that will pay enough to lift them and their families out of extreme poverty. There are recommendations for increasing access to public benefits for people who work but don’t make enough — and in a couple of cases, for increasing the benefits.

But there are also recommendations aimed at ensuring that people who can’t and aren’t expected to work — seniors, children and individuals with severe disabilities — can live “in dignity.”

Nothing radical about the recommendations themselves. The commission clearly felt constrained by the realities the government faces — a weakened safety net, a rising poverty rate, an immediate budget shortfall of at least $13 billion and a huge unfunded pension liability.

Yet the commission takes pains to make room for what’s essentially the very old concept of the deserving poor. The big difference is that, in the commission’s strategy, all poor are deserving.

Which bring me to the last and perhaps most interesting thing. The legislature charged the commission with addressing poverty in Illinois “consistent with international human rights standards.” This influenced both the commission’s process and its product.

It essentially justifies its proposals by citing and elaborating on the provision in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states that “everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family.”

This, the commission says, is based on our American tradition — a stretch I think, but probably needed to domesticate its vision.

We’re accustomed these days to seeing anti-poverty strategies justified on economic grounds. Much about the long-term costs of child poverty, for example — drains on public benefits programs, costs due to criminal behavior, reduced national productivity, etc.

We need these arguments, especially for policymakers fixated on the bottom line. But it’s good and important, I think, to reaffirm basic values — justice, compassion, the intrinsic worth of our fellow creatures.

That’s where the commission comes from. It prefaces its proposals with the proposition that “every human being deserves to have access to adequate amenities to fulfill his or her potential.”

In other words, the standard of living rights in the Universal Declaration — sufficient food, housing, medical care, social services and security when they can’t earn a living — “should be guaranteed, protected and made available to all people just because they exist as people.”

Imagine what would happen if our government officials and the majority of Americans who elect them felt this way.