Skip to main content

Home/ Domestic Poverty Analytics/ Group items tagged low-income

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Coonoor Behal

What Strategies Work for the Hard-to-Employ? | mdrc 2012 - 0 views

www.mdrc.org/at-strategies-work-hard-employ

behaviors barrierstowork employment MDRC ACF

shared by Coonoor Behal on 25 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Coonoor Behal on 25 Mar 13
     
    "In the context of a public safety net focused on limiting dependency and encouraging participation in the labor market, policymakers and researchers are especially interested in individuals who face obstacles to finding and keeping jobs. The Enhanced Services for the Hard-to-Employ (HtE) Demonstration and Evaluation Project was a 10-year study that evaluated innovative strategies aimed at improving employment and other outcomes for groups who face serious barriers to employment. The project was sponsored by the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, with additional funding from the U.S. Department of Labor. This report describes the HtE programs and summarizes the final results for each program. Additionally, it presents information for three sites from the ACF-sponsored Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) project where hard-to-employ populations were also targeted. Three of the eight models that are described here led to increases in employment. Two of the three - large-scale programs that provided temporary, subsidized "transitional" jobs to facilitate entry into the workforce for long-term welfare recipients in one program and for ex-prisoners in the other - produced only short-term gains in employment, driven mainly by the transitional jobs themselves. The third one - a welfare-to-work program that provided unpaid work experience, job placement, and education services to recipients with health conditions - had longer-term gains, increasing employment and reducing the amount of cash assistance received over four years. Promising findings were also observed in other sites. An early-childhood development program that was combined with services to boost parents' self-sufficiency increased employment and earnings for a subgroup of the study participants and increased the use of high-quality child care; the program for ex-prisoners mentioned abov
Coonoor Behal

Welfare Reform and the Work Support System | Brookings Institution - 0 views

www.brookings.edu/...welfare-sawhill

welfarereform work EITC policy 1996 povertyprograms worksupport

shared by Coonoor Behal on 09 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Among other provisions, the 1996 reforms required work of almost every adult that joined the welfare rolls. In addition, with some exceptions, a limit of five years was placed on the receipt of cash welfare by individual families.
  • Beginning roughly in the mid-1970s with the enactment of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), the federal government originated or expanded a series of programs that provide benefits to working families. Unlike welfare benefits, which are intended primarily for the destitute, these work support benefits are designed to provide cash and other benefits to working adults and their families. In addition to the EITC, the major benefits in the system include the child tax credit, the minimum wage, state income supplement programs, food stamps, health insurance, and child care.
  • This evolution toward a work-based system of support progressed further as a result of state responses to the 1996 welfare law.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • As a result, the typical one-parent family with children was far better off working than on welfare, and employment rates among this group increased dramatically, due to the strong economy of the 1990s, welfare reform, and the availability of these expanded work supports
  • The value of these new work support programs at both the federal and state level cannot be overemphasized. The EITC alone provides roughly $4,000 a year in extra benefits to a low-wage worker with two or more children, and the children remain eligible for Medicaid. The average woman leaving welfare earns about $7 an hour, or $13,000 in after-tax income. The combined value of food stamps and the EITC, then, brings her total income up to about $19,000—enough to boost a single parent family with three or fewer children above the federal poverty line
  • Polls show that the public is willing to do more for those who work.
  • Many of these policies respond to complaints that the 1996 welfare law placed too much emphasis on reducing caseloads and not enough on reducing poverty.
  • The work support system serves three primary goals. First, it provides incentives for work.
  • A second goal of the work support system is to help ensure that parents working at low-wage jobs have enough total income to provide an adequate standard of living.
  • The third goal of the work support system is to insure that those who lose their jobs or cannot find work will not be destitute.
  • The minimum wage is not very well-targeted. Only one quarter of minimum-wage earners live in poor families.
  • By 2000, the federal EITC was providing over $30 billion in cash supplements to working families, making it the biggest program other than Medicaid and Supplemental Security Income that provides benefits to low-income families. And unlike nearly every other program for low-income families, it provides benefits only to families that work. It is, in short, the quintessential work support program.
  • States have taken two major approaches to improving work incentives. First, since enactment of the 1996 reforms, nearly every state has allowed parents who find jobs to retain more of their welfare benefit. This policy enables many families to work and continue receiving earnings supplements from welfare.
  • under current federal rules, working families can exhaust their five-year limit on welfare while receiving just a small supplement to their earnings. For this reason, time limits may actually discourage work
  • A second approach states have followed is to create their own EITC programs.
  • nearly all the families leaving welfare are eligible for food stamps
  • less than half the families leaving welfare receive the food stamp benefits to which they are entitled.
Coonoor Behal

Census shows 1 in 2 people are poor or low-income - USATODAY.com - 0 views

usatoday30.usatoday.com/...1

low-income supplementalmeasure

shared by Coonoor Behal on 19 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • About 97.3 million Americans fall into a low-income category, commonly defined as those earning between 100 and 199 percent of the poverty level, based on a new supplemental measure by the Census Bureau that is designed to provide a fuller picture of poverty. Together with the 49.1 million who fall below the poverty line and are counted as poor, they number 146.4 million, or 48 percent of the U.S. population. That is up by 4 million from 2009, the earliest numbers for the newly developed poverty measure.
  • Among low-income families, about one-third were considered poor while the remainder, 6.9 million, earned income just above the poverty line.
Vetan Kapoor

Notes from "Poverty in America" by John Iceland (2012) - 0 views

Poverty in America: A Handbook (John Iceland, 2012) Chapter 4: Characteristics of the Poverty Population * 22.4% of Americans were poor in 1959, 11.1% in 1973, and 12.5% in 2003 * 70% of impoveri...

notes povertytraits books stats

started by Vetan Kapoor on 22 Mar 13 no follow-up yet
Coonoor Behal

http://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/acsbr10-17.pdf - 2 views

www.census.gov/...acsbr10-17.pdf

shared by Coonoor Behal on 19 Nov 12 - No Cached
    • Coonoor Behal
      Coonoor Behal on 26 Nov 12
       
      Why aren't poverty thresholds different based on cost of living across different states and cities? Does it make sense for the poverty threshold in NYC to be the same as Boise?
    • Vetan Kapoor
      Vetan Kapoor on 28 Nov 12
       
      Good point. My guess would be that the poverty line is calculated based on some basket of goods deemed vital to function at a basic level, and that most of these goods are within a fairly narrow price range (food, clothing etc.). Also the highest expenditures are probably in rent/housing (30-50% of income) and for low income folks these should be pretty comparable giving housing vouchers and other HUD type assistance?
  • Coonoor Behal on 26 Nov 12
     
    "People living in poverty tend to be clustered in certain neighborhoods rather than being evenly distributed across geographic areas."
  • ...4 more comments...
  • Coonoor Behal on 26 Nov 12
     
    "...living in areas with many other poor people places burdens on low-income families beyond what the families' own individual circumstances would dictate."
  • Coonoor Behal on 26 Nov 12
     
    "some government programs target resources to communities with concentrated poverty. Many of these programs use the Census Bureau's definition of "poverty areas" (census tracts with poverty rates of 20 percent or more)"
  • Coonoor Behal on 26 Nov 12
     
    "the South had a larger proportion of people (27.4 percent) living in poverty areas than any other region, followed by the West (21.6 percent)."
  • Coonoor Behal on 26 Nov 12
     
    "Nearly half (49.0 percent) of the 10.3 million people residing in category IV tracts lived in poverty, while a little more than a quarter (27.3 percent) of the 56.6 million in category III were in poverty."
  • Coonoor Behal on 26 Nov 12
     
    "More than one-half of the families in categories I, II, and III were married-couple families while only 43.2 percent of families in category IV tracts were married couples. Female householder families represented about 14 percent of families in category I tracts, but 46.2 percent of families in category IV tracts."
  • Coonoor Behal on 26 Nov 12
     
    "The poverty thresholds are updated annually to allow for changes in the cost of living using the Consumer Price Index (CPI-U). They do not vary geographically."
Coonoor Behal

Poverty Program: USA Poverty - 0 views

www.povertyprogram.com/usa.php

povertystats

shared by Coonoor Behal on 19 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Characteristics of the average homeless family:
  • These families were very low income—the average income for all families was only $573/month
  • Coonoor Behal on 19 Nov 12
     
    Lots of statistics on US poverty and poverty factors/indicators
Coonoor Behal

The poor in America: In need of help | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...election-campaign-they-deserve

povertyprograms systemic

shared by Coonoor Behal on 19 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Mr Obama’s re-election and Democratic control of the Senate give federal anti-poverty programmes a level of security they would have lacked under a Romney administration. But America’s poor face systemic challenges beyond the aid of any single administration or programme.
  • Most counties exhibiting persistent poverty—meaning counties with poverty rates of 20% or higher, consistently, from 1990 to 2010—are indeed in rural America (see map).
  • For most, poverty will be a temporary condition; chronic poverty remains relatively rare. But it does seem to be growing more common.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Another problem which got worse during the crisis, but was growing beforehand, is suburban poverty.
  • As of 2008 more than a third of America’s poor live in suburbs.
  • The number of poor people living in the suburbs grew 53% between 2000 and 2010
  • The eightfold growth in the prison population from 1970 to 2010 has turned ever more poor decisions into poor lives.
  • Most poor children live in single-parent homes, and most families that are poor lack married parents.
  • The amount the federal government spends on food stamps hit a record $75.7 billion in the 2011 fiscal year—more than double the level of 2008. Enrolment in Medicaid, through which federal and state governments provide health care to low-income Americans, has grown every year since 2008, though its 2012 growth was the slowest since the recession began, and its spending grew at a lower level than enrolment because of federal and state cost-control measures. In 2011 states disbursed $113.3 billion in unemployment benefits to 9.9m recipients, as well as roughly $16.6 billion received in block grants as part of a federal programme called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.
  • America is unusually reluctant, compared with other rich countries, about giving cash transfers to the poor.
  • Its benefits skew overwhelmingly toward families: the most a single person can claim is around $500, while a married couple with three or more dependent children can receive $5,000 or more. In 2010 $55 billion was paid out through the EITC, and $23 billion for the child tax credit.
Vetan Kapoor

Notes from "The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity" by J... - 0 views

Ch 3: The Free-Market Fallacy * 63% of Americans concur that "It is the responsibility of government to take care of people who can't take care of themselves. The sentiment that government should h...

started by Vetan Kapoor on 22 Mar 13 no follow-up yet
1 - 10 of 10
Showing 20▼ items per page