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The Success Sequence: Why Education, a Job, Marriage, Then Kids Is the Working Order

June 14, 2017

Ah, millennials. In some ways, they’re very traditional, suggesting that women should stay at home to raise their kids. In other ways, they are very Bohemian, doing as they please when the mood hits. But it turns out, the old-fashioned “success sequence” — a (high school or higher) degree, job, marriage, then children, in that order — is still the winning combination for securing financial well-being, even for this late-day-and-age group.

The term “success sequence” isn’t new. It was coined in the last decade by researchers looking for policy ideas that could help break the cycle of poverty. Of course, it was criticized for pointing out that the cycle of poverty is more likely to be perpetuated for kids born into poorly educated households without two parents and few economic opportunities. It has become rude to point this out even though that’s the problem the research is trying to solve.

But facts are facts, as it were, and a new study by W. Bradford Wilcox, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, and Wendy Wang, of the Institute for Family Studies, found that the success sequence holds up as a guidepost for today’s Millennials as it did for Baby Boomers, even after adjusting for a wide range of variables like childhood family income and education, employment status, race/ethnicity, sex, and respondents’ scores on the Armed Forces Qualifying Test (AFQT), which measures intelligence and knowledge of a range of subjects.

The study found that “diverging paths into adulthood” taken by 28- to 34-year-olds — the eldest of the Millennial age group — produce very different economic outcomes.

Among the findings:

Millennials who follow the “success sequence” almost always avoid poverty, with 97 percent of Millennials who married first not being poor by age 28, compared to 72 percent who had children first.
71 percent of Millennials from lower-income families who put marriage before children made it into the middle class or higher when they reached adulthood. Conversely, 41 percent of Millennials from lower-income families who put children first made it into the middle class or higher when they became adults.
Among black young adults, those who married before having children are almost twice as likely to be in the middle- or upper-income groups (76 percent) than those who had a baby first (39 percent).

Since 55 percent of 28- to 34-year-old millennial parents had their first child before marriage, the economic and family impacts will be felt for decades.

Millennials are more likely than previous generations to delay marriage and parenthood, but that doesn’t mean that they have to forego the order of education, work, and marriage. Indeed, there’s a reason the success sequence works.

Why might these three factors be so important for young adults today? Education confers knowledge, skills, access to social networks, and credentials that give today’s young adults a leg up in the labor force. Sustained full-time employment provides not only a basic floor for household income but, in many cases, opportunities for promotions that further boost income. Stable marriage seems to foster economies of scale, income pooling, and greater work effort from men, and to protect adults from the costs of multiple partner fertility and family instability.

Moreover, the sequencing of these factors is important insofar as young men and women are more likely to earn a decent income if they have at least acquired a high school education, and young marrieds are more likely to stay together if they have a modicum of education and a steady income. So, it’s not just that education, work, and marriage independently seem to matter, but the sequencing of education, work, and marriage may also increase the odds of financial success for today’s young adults.

Wilcox and Wang point out that there’s no statistical model to perfectly predict a youth’s future success. Some who succeeded came from roots missing those steps. Others who lived in households that followed the sequence ended up in the bottom third of the income scale. Lastly, there’s no conclusive evidence that the “sequence plays a causal or primary role in driving young adult success.”

The researchers also note that it’s easier to follow the success sequence when one is born into it, as opposed to young adults who came from poor neighborhoods, bad schools, and less educated households. It’s also easier to follow the success sequence when one comes from a cultural background that adopts these ideals and expectations rather than those groups who hold these values in lower regard.

But there’s no mistaking that the numbers overwhelmingly favor those who do follow the course, and that’s where both one’s personal “agency” and public policy come into play.

This report suggests that young adults from a range of backgrounds who followed the success sequence are markedly more likely to steer clear of poverty and realize the American Dream than young adults who did not follow the same steps.

Given the value of the success sequence, and the structural and cultural obstacles to realizing it faced by some young adults, policymakers, educators, civic leaders, and business leaders should take steps to make each component of the sequence more accessible. Any initiatives should be particularly targeted at younger adults from less advantaged backgrounds, who tend to have access to fewer of the structural and cultural resources that make the sequence readily attainable and appealing. The following three ideas are worth considering in any effort to strengthen the role that the success sequence plays in the lives of American young adults.

Read the full report here.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Life Tagged With: education, family, Institute for Family Studies, marriage, Millennials, poverty, success sequence, W. Bradford Wilcox

How Innovation Can Defeat Homelessness

April 18, 2017

“I see no advantage in these new clocks. They run no faster than the ones made 100 years ago.”
― Henry Ford

Henry Ford is credited with making cars better than those who came before him, but he also found a way to make them cheaper. So perhaps you can appreciate how maddening it must have been for Ford to look at the rising cost of goods that didn’t perform any better than their predecessors.

Same is true for social policy. While Ford revolutionized the production lines for cars, America’s homeless policy could benefit from a big dose of innovation. But where do we find the intellectual muscle?

The new book entitled “A Safety Net That Works” brings together some big thinkers on upward mobility, antipoverty programs, and government assistance. Among them is Kevin Corinth, a research fellow in economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, who argues that innovation, on both a small and a large scale, is a key component needed to fix the homelessness crisis facing too many Americans.

Homelessness in America remains a real and daunting problem despite reports of a decline in the number of homeless. While the number of homeless counted since 2007 has fallen, Corinth explains that the changing methodologies used to count the number of homeless may better explain the drop than an actual reduction in the number of people needing shelter. Meanwhile, Corinth reports, “A number of major cities have reportedly seen recent spikes in the numbers sleeping on the street, leading several to declare a homelessness state of emergency.”

Rather than double down on plans to end homelessness with old solutions, we should invest in innovative ideas that push progress forward, while ensuring that resources are prioritized to the people who need them most.”

That seems a simple ask … and a logical start. Knowing who needs help and then tailoring assistance programs to their needs seems like a much less complicated task if we know the population we’re dealing with and the variables in their situations. Without that, current housing assistance programs are throwing possible solutions at the wall to see what sticks.

To start, Corinth divides the homeless population into single adults versus families. He notes that “while 43 percent of homeless single adults are found on the street, only 10 percent of homeless families are found in unsheltered locations.” Disability, mental illness and addiction also play a critical role in identifying homeless individuals.

Better homelessness policy starts with making a fundamental distinction — homeless families are different than homeless single adults, and they require wholly different policy responses. Homeless families generally live in private rooms in shelters. They most often need temporary housing assistance to get back on their feet. Homeless single adults generally sleep on the street or in congregate shelters, and they often suffer from severe mental illness or substance abuse problems. They are more likely to require longer-term, service-rich interventions.”

After identifying who needs help and how we improve upon their current sheltering is just one step. Creating new ways to help people through better prioritization of resources, improved outreach, and increased quality of services, comes next.

How? One way would be to incentivize service providers – program managers who serve the homeless – by holding them responsible for achieving specific goals.

Service providers should be offered substantial flexibility in their service models, but they should be held accountable for their performance in helping their clients achieve desired outcomes.”

One way to do this could be to innovate new ways of tracking people, including where they sleep from night to night, if they are gaining and maintaining employment, and how their physical and mental health is affecting these variables.

Data mining, Corinth says, is critical to this kind of tracking, and as easy as using something as commonplace as smartphones:

Homelessness policy could be reoriented around smartphones and big data. Homeless individuals could be given free smartphones and full service plans in return for providing daily information on their sleeping locations, health status, and other outcomes. Research could be revolutionized with access to detailed, longitudinal data on an otherwise hidden population.”

He certainly does think outside the box. And why not? With more than $4 billion a year spent on programs, greater accountability would certainly help measure success.

Instead of continuing to spend, spend, spend on programs that aren’t meeting goals, we need big thinkers like Corinth to be backed by leaders who control purse strings. We need them to collaborate, to innovate, to invent, and to implement new ways to tackle old problems.

There is no one-size-fits-all to helping those who are homeless. It’s an extremely challenging and complex issue. And while it’s easy to point a finger at the failures to help keep individuals and families safely sheltered, we can look once again to America’s great innovator, Henry Ford, to remind us that it’s not enough to see the problem.

“Don’t find fault, find a remedy.”

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Life Tagged With: antipoverty programs, big data, homelessness, Kevin Corinth, poverty

Scholarships to Encourage Kids to Attend School in Low-Income Neighborhoods?

April 3, 2017

Here’s a thought. Instead of busing underprivileged kids to wealthy suburbs, how about sending kids from wealthy households to private schools in low-income neighborhoods?

Some might say, “No way, I’m not sending my kid into a dangerous neighborhood just to attend a private school.” But what if a scholarship program could gentrify neighborhoods by encouraging parents to move to or stay in lower-income areas and send their kids to nearby private schools?

Residence as a determinant of school district has been a factor in the middle-class movement out of urban areas. Urban schools have declined in quality as a result of urban flight, and the surrounding neighborhoods have become blighted as the schools become increasingly dysfunctional. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The Community Protection and Revitalization (CPR) scholarships aims to help decrease concentrated poverty, crime, and unemployment in communities that are threatened by urban flight. In a new brief, Bartley R. Danielsen identifies how more multifaceted reforms can not only improve educational outcomes for students but also increase opportunity on a larger scale for more Americans.

Many observe these problems and incorrectly attribute the plight of urban districts to bad school-district leadership. Bad leadership is not the primary cause of urban schools’ problems. If leadership could solve this problem, some urban district would have already solved it. Further, it is not reasonable to believe that all urban districts always have bad leadership. Instead, the plight of urban districts is a natural equilibrium condition that results when school assignments are based on residence.

Danielsen, an associate professor of finance and real estate at North Carolina State University, notes that historically, methods of addressing poverty in the education system have included moving kids — and often their entire family — out of poor neighborhoods through section 8 housing vouchers, and more recently, school choice vouchers.

These vouchers are often assigned by lottery or means-testing, but that method does nothing to actually fix the community that is being abandoned. The peripheral effect doesn’t just cause repercussions to the neighborhood left behind, but to wealthier communities that see rents and regulations go up in response to voucher families moving in.

An interesting argument Danielson makes is that a lot of areas that could benefit from these scholarships may be lower income, but that doesn’t mean they are bad places. Many families already live there, but decide to move when their kids are school age because they want them to attend a better quality public school. But dropping parochial or private schools into these areas and offering scholarships would keep those families in place.

Danielsen’s design for a CPR scholarship is aimed at not only keeping public money in the areas where it does the most good, but indirectly benefiting communities by attracting businesses that wish to be near quality schools. In other words, the scholarship not only is to ensure a good education, but to ensure resources are assigned to poorer neighborhoods.

You can read his proposal, but do you think that putting good schools in struggling neighborhoods and paying families to send their kids there could work to revitalize those neighborhoods?

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Life Tagged With: poverty, private schools, school choice, urban flight

A Safety Net That Works: Enforcing Child Support Payments

March 17, 2017

What parent doesn’t want to help his or her child? Most people would wonder why the question even needs to be asked. But while child neglect and child poverty are issues that the social safety net and public assistance rightfully focus on addressing, legislative efforts to require delinquent or absent parents to take financial responsibility prove a handy tool for reducing the problem of childhood poverty.

Child Support Enforcement (CSE) was first passed into federal law in 1974. It was set up to make parents become financially responsible for their children. At the time, 75 percent of welfare caseloads involved an absent parent.

CSE became a part of the social services network in order to take pressure off government services and return the job of parenting to where it belonged — the parent. Yet nonpayment of child support remains a huge problem today, even after the 1996 welfare reform law strongly enhanced enforcement mechanisms.

Child Support Enforcement is an issue that crosses partisan lines. Separation and divorce are an unfortunate circumstance of modern life, and child support delinquencies are not confined to one particular income level or political belief. At the same time, CSE was a major factor in reducing poverty among children after the 1996 welfare reform law was signed.

Believe it or not, one quarter of the welfare reform law of 1996 was dedicated to CSE. Its impact was notable. Child support agreements among poor parents increased by 8 percentage points from 1993-2003, meaning more children were assured that the parent not living with them helped pay for their upbringing. Enforcing child support payments resulted in a 74 percent increase in payment collections over 10 years.

So what happened? In the second decade since the law was passed, the percentage of custodial parents with a payment agreement dropped by nearly 14 points.

What accounts for the loss of momentum? Robert Doar, the former commissioner of New York City’s Health and Human Services, explains.

What accounts for this loss of momentum is a legitimate, although exaggerated, concern about being too tough on poor noncustodial parents, the parent who is not living with the child. A false wisdom has emerged in the policy community—from academics to the media—that the child support system forces noncustodial dads to, as the headline of a 2015 New York Times story put it, “Skip Child Support. Go to Jail. Lose Job. Repeat.” Some influential commentators even see the system as fundamentally unjust by imposing on poor men burdens that are viewed as the government’s responsibility. …

Certainly, some poor noncustodial parents are struggling and need help to live up to their obligations. But most noncustodial parents, poor and nonpoor alike, are capable of working and could contribute something—even a regular payment of $25 per month has value. Analysts who are critical of the program seem to forget that the parent raising the child full time is often poor too. In 2013, for poor custodial parents who received child support payments, the noncustodial parent’s payments represented 49 percent of their income. Allowing parents to completely walk away from their financial responsibility to their children should not be an option.

According to Doar, if the share of poor custodial parents with agreements had held steady at the percentage that it was in 2003 when the welfare reform law was still being closely enforced, then 500,000 more poor custodial parents would have had orders to receive support in 2013!

“Surely a substantial fraction of these parents would have received enough in payments for them and their children to be lifted above the poverty line,” he wrote in the introduction to a recent volume he edited on the topic.

What Reasons Are There For Parents to Refuse to Pay Child Support?

A lot of times, the parent responsible for child support payments is cut off from the child. Other times, resentment of one parent toward the other leads to a child being caught in the middle. Still other times, suspicion that the money is being misused by the custodial parent is made as an excuse by noncustodial parents to withhold payments.

But sometimes, the paying parent claims he just can’t afford it. And while that claim may have been doubted or disproven, it sadly is becoming a more frequent excuse due to an unfortunate shift in American culture and economy — notably the increasing struggle of men in the labor market. More from Doar:

Reliable data on noncustodial parents are hard to come by because the Census Bureau’s major surveys do not ask whether a man living alone is also a nonresident father. But a survey from 1997 conducted by the Urban Institute found that only 43 percent of noninstitutionalized, nonresident fathers who were poor worked at all—and this was during the late 1990s economic boom. Another study from the Urban Institute used administrative data from nine states in 2003 and 2004 and found that 25 percent of all obligors had no reported income. …

I suspect, given the evidence on young, low-skilled men generally, that these rates must look even worse today. In 2000, among African American men age 16–24 without a high school diploma and not in school, the employment rate was 40.8 percent, and for similarly positioned whites, it was 72.3 percent. By 2007 (like 2000, a year at the peak of the business cycle), the rates had fallen dramatically to 28.7 and 55.0 percent, respectively.

Seven million men age 25 to 54 are not working or even looking for work, according to recent data. Many of them have children despite having never married. These men are disproportionately less educated, and seen by woman as less “marriageable.” Yet marriage is a reliable indicator of higher paying jobs.

With the increasing struggle of men in the labor market, sympathy has shifted. But there is something of a chicken-and-egg argument to all this. Where once women claimed they didn’t need men to raise their children, they still demanded that fathers (a majority of noncustodial parents) help out. Did women tell men to get lost because they were dead weight? Or did men become deadbeats because their paternal role was rejected?

Data show that 70 percent of arrears are owed by noncustodial parents who have no documented income or very little earnings (less than $10,000 a year). And 25 percent of poor custodial parents with a support agreement aren’t receiving payments. So whatever the relationship between parents, the question is now whether it is even possible to get blood from a stone?

Much can be done to fix the mish-mash of regulations and changes that have occurred over the last 40 years. For instance, determining what is a proper measure of a noncustodial parent’s income would go a long way to changing the way male parents look at work. Why is this? Because evaluating a parent’s ability to pay support based on an over-the-table paycheck disincentivizes men from going to work.

The reforms to the program in 1996 focused on tracking down and holding accountable “deadbeat” dads, but it did little to acknowledge or address those who really are dead broke. This is a difficult balance to strike—I know from my experience working in New York that many fathers who appear to have few assets and no earnings are working off-the-books or involved in illicit activities, but they are reluctant to make that known because they either do not want to pay or do not want the government to know of their off-the-books activities.

Another issue is the requirement to declare the other parent’s ability to pay support before qualifying for assistance. The purpose of the requirement is to ensure custodial parents look to the other parent to contribute before going to the government for help. This is the case with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the cash welfare program.

But TANF is on the decline while Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicaid, child care, and housing assistance programs are on the rise. And guess what? Those programs don’t require opening a child support case as a condition of receiving aid.

But the issue, Doar explains once more, isn’t necessarily a matter of what you have to reveal, but whether the revelation leads to some kind of change.

Policy should not have to choose between helping single mothers or low-income men. CSE is a rare government program (outside the criminal justice system) that interacts often with disconnected, low-skilled men, but it does not do enough to help them. Order amounts should be responsive to the noncustodial parent’s ability to pay and his changing economic circumstances, and significant improvements have been made on this front. But a singular focus on reducing order amounts and forgiving arrears distracts from the main challenge these men face: not enough of them are working. Instead of reducing what we expect of these men, we should help them better meet their obligations to their families and society.

Lastly, Doar notes that if federal or state assistance is dependent on parents working, then expand the programs that incentivize work.

While momentum has been building in Washington for an expansion of the earned income tax credit (EITC) for all childless adults, this policy is not well-targeted. A better solution is to expand the EITC for noncustodial parents who work and pay current child support. As commissioner in New York State, I created and implemented such a program, and an Urban Institute analysis found that it increased the share of parents who paid their support in full.

Why Is the Child Support Enforcement Program Important?

Historically, CSE has worked. Even as late as 2015, CSE resulted in $5.26 in payments for ever dollar spent on enforcement. Doar explains that enforcement works for several reasons:

The program sends a clear message to all potential parents: if you play a role in bringing a child into the world, you have a responsibility to help support him or her.
Strong child support enforcement not only communicates that essential American value, it changes the incentives around fathering children outside of marriage by making it impossible to abandon the responsibilities of parenthood.
When child support obligations force an absent parent to be reminded of his financial responsibilities, he is also more likely to take up his other parental duties and be more involved in the child’s life. Unsurprisingly then, receiving child support is also linked to better outcomes for the children involved.
Studies have found that formal child support payments are associated with fewer behavioral problems, better academic performance, and increased self-esteem.
While it may seem counterintuitive, the CSE program offers one of policy’s best opportunities to address the crisis of prime-age male nonwork in America.

CSE is a needed and effective program. It currently lifts more than one million families above the government’s official poverty line, reduces single parenthood, and improves child outcomes, all by enforcing and facilitating personal responsibility at very low cost to taxpayers.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Life Tagged With: child support, Child Support Enforcement, poverty, Robert Doar, safety net, SNAP, TANF, welfare reform

The Dignity Deficit: Reclaiming Americans’ Sense of Purpose

March 3, 2017 by Arthur C. Brooks

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt on Arthur Brooks’ piece on the “Dignity Deficit” as published in Foreign Affairs magazine. The full text is available for subscribers:

“He who establishes conventional wisdom owns history,” a historian once told me.

So it’s no surprise that ever since last year’s extraordinary U.S. presidential election, all sides have been bitterly fighting over what happened—and why. The explanations for Donald Trump’s surprise victory have varied widely. But one factor that clearly played an important role was the alienation and disaffection of less educated white voters in rural and exurban areas. Trump may have proved to be a uniquely popular tribune for this constituency. But the anger he tapped into has been building for half a century.

The roots of that anger lie all the way back in the 1960s, when President Lyndon Johnson launched his so-called War on Poverty. Only by properly understanding the mistakes made in that war—mistakes that have deprived generations of Americans of their fundamental sense of dignity—can the country’s current leaders and political parties hope to start fixing them. And only once they properly understand the problem will they be able to craft the kind of cultural and political agenda that can heal the country’s wounds.

All the way with LBJ

On April 24, 1964, Johnson paid a highly publicized visit to Inez, the biggest town in eastern Kentucky’s Martin County. Inez was the heart of coal country, the most typical Appalachian town that Johnson’s advisers could find. In the 1960s, “typical Appalachian” meant a place suffering from crippling despair. The citizens of Inez were poor. Many of them were unemployed, and their children were malnourished. Johnson had chosen Inez to illustrate that dire poverty was not just a Third World phenomenon: it existed right here at home, and not just in cities but in rural America as well. But he also came to Inez to announce that this tragedy could be remedied.

In one famous photo op, Johnson stopped by the home of a man named Tom Fletcher, an unemployed 38-year-old father of eight. The president climbed up onto Fletcher’s porch, squatted down next to him, and listened to the man’s story. According to a 2013 article in the Lexington Herald-Leader by John Cheves, “Fletcher never finished elementary school and could not really read. The places where he had labored—coal mines, sawmills—were closed. He struggled to support his wife and eight children.” The president used Fletcher’s struggles as a springboard for his own announcement. “I have called for a national war on poverty,” he declared. “Our objective: total victory.” Years later, Cheves reports, Johnson still remembered the encounter. “My determination,” he wrote in his memoirs, “was reinforced that day to use the powers of the presidency to the fullest extent that I could, to persuade America to help all its Tom Fletchers.” Over the next five decades, the federal government would spend more than $20 trillion trying to achieve Johnson’s dream with social welfare programs such as Medicaid, food stamps, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children.

Tom Fletcher personally received some of this largess: he got welfare benefits and found employment through government make-work initiatives, laboring on crews that cleared brush and picked up trash from roadsides. But he never held down a steady job, Cheves recounts, and although his standard of living rose along with the national average, he never made it out of poverty. By 1969, he no longer worked at all and relied instead on disability checks and other public assistance. After his first wife died, he married a woman four decades his junior, with whom he had two more children. In a cruel final twist, Fletcher’s second wife murdered one of those children (and tried to kill the other) as part of a scam to collect on their burial insurance. In 2004, with his wife still in prison, Fletcher died, never having gotten much closer to the American dream than he was when Johnson climbed onto his porch.

Visit the area today, and despite Johnson’s promises, you’ll see that idleness and depression still hang heavy in the air. In Inez, as across the country, the welfare state and modern technology have made joblessness and poverty less materially painful. Homes have electricity and running water. Refrigerators, personal computers, and cars are ubiquitous. Economic growth and innovation have delivered material abundance, and some of the War on Poverty’s programs have proved effective at bolstering struggling families.

But even though poverty has become less materially miserable, it is no less common. In Martin County, just 27 percent of adults are in the labor force. Welfare is more common than work. Caloric deficits have been replaced by rampant obesity. Meanwhile, things aren’t much better on the national level. In 1966, when the War on Poverty programs were finally up and running, the national poverty rate stood at 14.7 percent. By 2014, it stood at 14.8 percent. In other words, the United States had spent trillions of dollars but seen no reduction in the poverty rate.

Of course, the poverty rate doesn’t take into account rising consumption standards or a variety of government transfers, from food stamps to public housing to cash assistance. But the calculations that determine it do include most of the income that Americans earn for themselves. So although the rate is a poor tool for gauging material conditions, it does capture trends in Americans’ ability to earn success. And what it shows is that progress on that front has been scant.

The War on Poverty has offered plenty of economic analgesics but few cures. This is a failure not just in the eyes of conservative critics but also according to the standard set by the man who launched the campaign. On signing the Appalachian Regional Development Act in March 1965, Johnson argued that the United States should aspire to more than simply sustaining people in poverty. “This nation,” he declared, “is committed not only to human freedom but also to human dignity and decency.” R. Sargent Shriver, a key Johnson adviser on the War on Poverty, put it even more explicitly: “We’re investing in human dignity, not doles.”

I need you to need me

At its core, to be treated with dignity means being considered worthy of respect. Certain situations bring out a clear, conscious sense of our own dignity: when we receive praise or promotions at work, when we see our children succeed, when we see a volunteer effort pay off and change our neighborhood for the better. We feel a sense of dignity when our own lives produce value for ourselves and others. Put simply, to feel dignified, one must be needed by others.

The War on Poverty did not fail because it did not raise the daily caloric consumption of Tom Fletcher (it did). It failed because it did nothing significant to make him and Americans like him needed and thus help them gain a sense of dignity. It also got the U.S. government into the business of treating people left behind by economic change as liabilities to manage rather than as human assets to develop.

The dignity deficit that has resulted is particularly acute among working-class men, most of whom are white and live in rural and exurban parts of the United States. In his recent book Men Without Work, the political economist (and American Enterprise Institute scholar) Nicholas Eberstadt shows that the percentage of working-age men outside the labor force—that is, neither working nor seeking work—has more than tripled since 1965, rising from 3.3 percent to 11.6 percent. And men without a high school degree are more than twice as likely to be part of this “un-working” class.

These men are withdrawing not only from the labor force but from other social institutions as well. Two-thirds of them are unmarried. And Eberstadt found that despite their lack of work obligations, these men are no more likely to spend time volunteering, participating in religious activities, or caring for family members than men with full-time employment.

That sort of isolation and idleness correlates with severe pathologies in rural areas where drug abuse and suicide have become far more common in recent years. In 2015, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published an extraordinary paper by the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton. They found that, in contrast to the favorable long-term trends in life expectancy across the rest of the developed world, the mortality rate among middle-aged white Americans without any college education has actually risen since 1999. The main reasons? Since that year, among that population, fatalities due to chronic liver disease and cirrhosis have increased by 46 percent, fatalities from suicide have risen by 78 percent, and fatalities due to drug and alcohol poisoning are up by a shocking 323 percent.

Unsurprisingly, those left behind hold a distinctly gloomy view of the future. According to a survey conducted last year by the Kaiser Family Foundation and CNN, fewer than one-quarter of white Americans without a college degree expect their children to enjoy a better standard of living in the future than they themselves have today, and half of them believe things will be even worse. (In contrast, according to the same survey, other historically marginalized communities have retained a more old-school American sense of optimism: 36 percent of working-class blacks and 48 percent of working-class Hispanics anticipate a better life for their children.)

To be sure, rural and exurban whites who possess few in-demand skills and little education are hardly the only vulnerable group in the United States today. But the evidence is undeniable that this community is suffering an acute dignity crisis. Left behind every bit as much as the urban poor, millions of working-class whites have languished while elites have largely ignored them or treated them with contempt.

Americans from all walks of life voted for Trump. But exit polls unambiguously showed that a crucial central pillar of his support came from modern-day Tom Fletchers: Trump beat Hillary Clinton among white men without a college degree by nearly 50 percentage points. Tellingly, among counties where Trump outperformed the 2012 GOP candidate Mitt Romney, the margins were greatest in those places with the highest rates of drug use, alcohol abuse, and suicide.

Many analysts and policy experts saw Trump’s campaign as a series of sideshows and unserious proposals that, even if implemented, would not actually improve things for his working-class supporters. For example, academic research clearly shows that trade protectionism—a major theme of Trump’s campaign—is more likely to destroy jobs than create them. Yet Trump won regardless, because he was the first major-party nominee in decades who even appeared to care about the dignity of these working-class voters whose lives are falling apart.

Welfare to work

If its goal is to instill dignity, the U.S. government does not need to find more innovative ways to “help” people; rather, it must find better ways to make them more necessary. The question for leaders, no matter where they sit on the political spectrum, must be, Does this policy make people more or less needed—in their families, their communities, and the broader economy?

Shock Story: Exploiting the Homeless Addicted for Profit

March 1, 2017

The Washington City Paper is reporting a completely distressing story entitled “Eviction Companies Pay the Homeless Illegally Low Wages to Put People on the Street.”

The headline pretty much says it all, but some of the details are worth noting. First, the homeless are coming to a local shelter in D.C. each day hoping to be picked up as day laborers. Second, the men (and occasional) women homeless people are generally dealing with addiction of some kind. Third, the eviction companies have already been sued about paying below minimum wage to these day workers. Fourth, while the payments are extremely low, the companies pick homeless addicts and occasionally supplement the wages with alcohol. This effectively drives the homeless addicts to get another fix, which then leads them back to the miserable work arrangement so they can get just enough money to get another boost.

Here’s part of the report:

A man who works for both Street Sense and on the trucks, who is homeless and did not want to be named for fear of retribution from the eviction companies, says he first got work on an East Coast Express Eviction truck right after he moved to D.C. several years ago. He had heard through the grapevine that employment was available outside S.O.M.E. and was surprised to find that he did not need to fill out paperwork. When he first got on the truck, he says he saw a cooler of beer, and thought, “I’m in the right place.” It seemed like a party—and it was—drinking in a van with other guys before work. But he soon learned that whatever he drank would be deducted from his pay at the end of the day.

And he realized why the men were getting beers. “We have seen babies crying, grandmas. … You get a beer, so you don’t have any emotion,” he says in an interview at the Street Sense offices. “You do some kind of drugs, so then you don’t care, so you leave them on the curb over there crying, and go on to next one.” He says the evictees don’t get any information either—no shelter listing or hotline number.

The man, who struggles with a drinking problem, also says it was no mystery to him why eviction companies continued to show up outside S.O.M.E. even after the lawsuit. “Instead of choosing someone professional who says, ‘I can’t do it,’ they choose people who don’t have any feelings anymore, and have given up on life,” he says. “Because they will get on this truck for $7.”

As poverty and homelessness research Kevin Corinth states, this is NOT OKAY. But Corinth’s reasons aren’t exactly what you may expect. For one, he’s not arguing about whether the minimum wage is “fair.” Nor does Corinth have a problem with eviction in principle. Even as a researcher on homelessness, he acknowledges that landlords have a legal and moral right to be paid rent for providing living accommodations. As he points out, “Stopping all evictions would mean that landlords would no longer be willing to accept the tenants who are at greater risk of defaulting on their rental obligations in the first place.”

Corinth also doesn’t have an issue with the person who would take the job of evicting a family because while difficult to do, a professional and empathetic worker can “help preserve a sense of humanity in the face of horrible circumstances.”

For Corinth, his issue is with eviction companies that would exploit homeless people with addiction to keep them coming back to the illegally low-wage job.

Rather than being encouraged to serve with professionalism and empathy, they are encouraged to numb their humanity with alcohol.

And that means that families at their lowest point are dehumanized as well. Their personal belongings are handled by crews of men who have shut down. Meanwhile, some workers reportedly engage in theft to supplement their wages. As ACLU attorney Scott Michelman puts it, “[l]osing your home shouldn’t mean losing your dignity.”

Corinth says there are solutions to the mistreatment of homeless addicted aside from taking these companies to court. They include relaxing regulations on how many workers must be used to clear out a house, which leads eviction companies to look for cheap, unqualified work crews.

Another solution could be to prevent evictions from happening in the first place. Recent research has shown that offering families who are at risk of homelessness modest one-time payment leads to sharp reductions in entries into homeless shelters (and presumably reduces evictions as well).

The research Corinth references is here. It notes that one funding experiment found that giving someone who is about to become homeless a single cash infusion, averaging about $1000, could delay homelessness for two years. The research was done by offering one-time cash payments “to people on the brink of homelessness who can demonstrate that they will be able to pay rent by themselves in the future, but who have been afflicted by some nonrecurring crisis, such as a medical bill.” The team found those who received the cash infusion were 88 percent less likely to become homeless after three months and 76 percent less likely after six months. That’s a worthwhile investment when the overall cost of homelessness to society is much more expensive.

Read Corinth’s commentary here.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Happiness, Life Tagged With: eviction, homelessness, Kevin Corinth, minimum wage, poverty

New Bill Encourages Private Sector to Help Struggling Communities

February 6, 2017

Turns out even lawmakers on Capitol Hill think it’s not the government but the private sector that must make the needed investments to turn around struggling areas of the country. So a group of lawmakers has come up with a tax proposal to do just that.

The Republican-led Congress is getting ready to debate the Investing in Opportunity Act, but get a load of this: it’s a bipartisan bill! Whaa? Unheard of, it would seem, but a real-live attempt at creating some good.

The proposal is the work of Democratic Rep. Ron Kind of Wisconsin and Republican Rep. Pat Tiberi of Ohio in the House of Representatives. Sens. Tim Scott, R-S.C., and Cory Booker, D-N.J., are shepherding the effort through the Senate. The bill is aimed at spurring private-sector investment in “distressed communities,” combating both poverty and the lingering gaps in economic recovery.

Those communities account for 50 million Americans that are below average thresholds on education, unemployment, poverty, median income ratio, and housing availability.

As Roll Call explains:

The legislation would allow investors to defer paying capital gains taxes if they reinvest in “opportunity funds” that would be targeted at “opportunity zones,” or a low-income communities designated by state governments.

“There’s really no direct federal involvement other than we defer capital gains,” Tiberi, a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, told a small group of reporters gathered in Scott’s office Thursday. “There is a cost because of the deferral of capital gains, but ultimately, those will be paid.”

The fact that the bill allows state governments to direct the funds and does not involve additional federal funds being sent to these communities should make it attractive to lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, the bill’s proponents said. …

The lawmakers said encouraging private-sector investment in those communities could have a multiplying effect. The addition of a new grocery store, Tiberi explained, would create more jobs and attract more people to the neighborhood.

This is not the first go-round of the bill. It was introduced in the last Congress, but because it dealt with taxes, it was dead on arrival. Now that President Trump has made tax reform and underserved communities two of his priorities, the GOP is looking at “budget reconciliation,” or bypassing the 60-vote threshold required in the Senate to end debate on legislation and head to a vote. Now it’s just a matter of picking up support for the legislation.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Life Tagged With: distressed communities, poverty, private sector investment, Rep. Pat Tiberi, Rep. Ron Kind, Sen. Tim Scott, tax reform

A Better Measure of America’s Poverty Rate

December 2, 2016

Sen. Mike Lee is proposing legislation that, if instituted correctly, could more accurately reflect America’s poverty rate to better determine the impact of welfare assistance and whether it is doing the job it is supposed to do.

Lee’s proposal is called the Poverty Measurement Improvement Act. The point of it is just as the title explains: to more accurately measure household incomes to see if poverty is as bad as the data indicate.

As Lee, R-Utah, explains:

This bill would improve the data available to lawmakers by authorizing a new Census Bureau survey that would more accurately calculate income by including wages and federal means-tested benefits. This information would then be linked with individual records from the IRS and other federal agencies that administer means-tested benefit programs.

The Census Bureau calculates the official poverty rate, but the results are based on families’ pre-tax, cash income, and ignores assistance like Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs (SNAP) and tax credits for working families. The result is that the Census counts the people who are being helped by these programs as still living in poverty when in fact they may be living in much better conditions.

Poverty has been a persistent and seemingly intractable problem for decades. President Lyndon Johnson launched the Great Society in 1964 with the goal of eradicating poverty. But in 1966, the poverty rate was 14.7 percent while in 2012, it was 15 percent. The lowest the poverty rate ever reached was during the Nixon administration, when it dove to 11.1 percent (1973).

In 2012, the amount spent on poverty programs was 20 times higher than when the anti-poverty programs were instituted in 1964, and during that time assistance has increased from $160 to more than $2,000 per person in real dollars.

As an aside, the number of children being raised by a single mother rose from 8 percent in 1964 to 23.7 percent in 2013 while the number of working-age men (25-54) participating in the labor force has dropped by shocking amounts.

As demographer Nick Eberstadt tells it, 7 million working-age men are currently not seeking work:

In fact, if work rates for men were only as high today as in 1965—a time when we enjoyed true “full employment”—nearly 10 million more men would have paying jobs today. Think of the difference that would make to our country.

In other words, what used to be a “nuclear household” has seemingly been nuked. Lee noted the impact of government programs that discourage one of the most important relationships individuals have and society benefits from: families.

The core problem with our welfare system today isn’t just its bloated annual budget, but its tendency to undermine the two most dependable routes out of poverty: marriage and work.

But we can’t improve these programs until we have better data on how they are affecting working families. The Poverty Measurement Improvement Act will do just that.

Poverty researchers on both sides of the political aisle agree that government assistance helps pull people out of poverty. Accurately measuring the role of public assistance will help determine where opportunities lie to increase workforce participation, encourage stronger households, and inform the role of programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit that are used to get people into the workforce. That’s a goal to encourage, and measuring the data correctly seems like an easy starting point.

Filed Under: Happiness, Life Tagged With: labor force participation rate, marriage, Nick Eberstadt, poverty, Sen. Mike Lee, US Census Bureau

How Trump Can Improve Antipoverty Programs

November 18, 2016

With the presidential election in the rear view mirror, Washington and the rest of the country are now turning attention to what President Trump will mean for public policy. What would Trump do for antipoverty programs? Given Trump’s early focus on relieving child care costs for working mothers, that could be an early achievement for his administration.

A Trump administration may also be willing to require more labor force participation among SNAP and disability program recipients and could expand work-based tax credits.

After an election that showed the country is unsatisfied with the status quo, if Congress and the next administration are willing to put in a little work of their own, reforms to antipoverty programs could help more Americans get back to work.

Poverty studies researcher Angela Rachidi sketches an outline of a potential Trump antipoverty agenda.

Included should be a top-to-bottom review of existing safety net and job training programs. Ripe for reform are food, disability, and housing assistance programs — all of which could do more to support work among recipients. Additionally, workforce development programs, many of which have limited evidence of success, expansions to work-support programs, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and child care assistance, and efforts to improve the quality of education from birth to college, all deserve a serious look.

This is not a new concept for fans of TPOH. Indeed, apprentice training programs, gradual replacement of benefits as individuals climb the income ladder, and changes to disability programs have long been concepts discussed by TPOH to help the most vulnerable get on their own two feet.

For instance, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) provides that if a household doesn’t bring in a lot of money, then the government can supplement its earnings to help people stay on their feet and in their homes. However, childless households receive only $500 for a credit, not much of an incentive to encourage people to aspire to greater levels of achievement. It may seem counter-intuitive, but if individuals don’t develop an aptitude toward work, they won’t work, and will become dependent on welfare, so it makes sense to encourage work until people can develop the skills and interest in participating in the job market. EITC has shown that it has a positive effect on workforce participation.

As for apprenticeship programs, the original job training, who better to encourage that then the host of the 14-yearlong show called, “The Apprentice”? If exempted from minimum wage requirements, apprenticeship programs could be an area where companies feel encouraged to pick up and train employees in the areas where they need help. While getting on-the-job training from real-life employers, the government could use existing job training and college aid budgets to subsidize salaries, making sure individuals in these programs have enough money to live on while they develop their skills.

Finally, as labor economist Michael Strain explains, Social Security Disability Insurance was originally designed to help people who could no longer work after spending years in physically demanding jobs. Automation has reduced the number of physically exhausting jobs, yet the number of working-age adults on SSDI doubled between 1989-2009. This program has effectively discouraged work when it need not do so.

In today’s services economy, disability is often more a continuum than a binary state — a person may be disabled in the sense that he can’t stock shelves, but not disabled in the sense that he can’t sit behind a desk for 25 hours per week. SSDI should be modified to reflect this, covering individuals who truly cannot work, as a just society should, while encouraging others to do what work they can.

In other words, the safety net is becoming a hammock, discouraging people from working when it would be better used and more economical to help those who truly need a lift. Individuals with limited mobility can work in jobs that require fewer physical demands. As Mike Zelley, founder and president of the Disability Network, states, a half-million people with disabilities, including the 43 percent of whom have a college degree, are disincentivized to work because of federal disability programs.

The reality is that, due to his lack of specific proposals or experience in government, it is unknown what President-elect Trump intends to do to fight poverty. Will he be a strong fiscal conservative who focuses on requiring work, reducing fraud, and holding the line on the size of government; a Rockefeller Republican content to increase spending; or something else entirely?

Hopefully, the “wait-and-see” mode will soon be over.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Liberty Tagged With: Angela Rachidi, Donald Trump, EITC, Michael Strain, Mike Zelley, poverty, SNAP, SSDI

A Catholic and a Buddhist Walk Into a Think Tank …

November 4, 2016

If the Dalai Lama were hanging around Washington, D.C., with the head of a free-market think tank, and the two were strategizing on how to build an embarrassment of riches, would you wonder what has become of the world?

If you would, you probably didn’t know that the Tibetan Buddhist leader is hanging out with Arthur Brooks, a man who has described himself as the most Buddhist Catholic he knows. And you probably didn’t know that the two are soulmates of a sort, in a quest to refocus Washington on increasing personal empowerment and helping people achieve their higher calling.

Indeed, Brooks and the Dalai Lama recently penned a New York Times essay in which they note their common goal.

What unites the two of us in friendship and collaboration is not shared politics or the same religion. It is something simpler: a shared belief in compassion, in human dignity, in the intrinsic usefulness of every person to contribute positively for a better and more meaningful world.

That sounds friendly, right? But what does it mean? America is living proof that financial wealth doesn’t solve all our problems. In fact, many problems are not wealth-related at all. All over the world, poverty has been reduced and billions of people now have a roof over their heads and regular meals.

Wealth disparity is not really the issue either. As the Dalai Lama points out, the billionaire’s and the pauper’s stomachs can only extend the same amount. The rich man and the poor man both have 10 fingers, whether they wear 20 rings or no rings at all.

As people all over the world become more secure and financially stable, Western society is facing an obvious malaise. The United States is looking at a decline in its labor force participation rate, and working-age men are dropping out of the workforce all over Western societies. What is the root of this problem?

Pain and indignation are sweeping through prosperous countries. The problem is not a lack of material riches. It is the growing number of people who feel they are no longer useful, no longer needed, no longer one with their societies. …

Feeling superfluous is a blow to the human spirit. It leads to social isolation and emotional pain, and creates the conditions for negative emotions to take root.

In other words, the authors suggest that the pillar of the happiest life is wealth, but not wealth defined as durable goods and bank accounts, but a sense of creating value and a positive contribution.

Much research on the topic shows that people who feel they have purpose live longer and healthier lives. If they can earn their own way, create something, and serve others, they have the greatest ability to feel purposeful. The lack of a sense of purpose has created a deep anxiety and its attendant scourges, both personally and for society at large.

Being ‘needed’ does not entail selfish pride or unhealthy attachment to the worldly esteem of others. Rather, it consists of a natural human hunger to serve our fellow men and women. As the 13th-century Buddhist sages taught, ‘If one lights a fire for others, it will also brighten one’s own way.’

In a society fraught with frenetic energy like that of the United States, defining purpose can be a mighty salve to our sense of discontent. Yes, having the financial ability to relieve day-to-day worries is always an issue, but the degree to which one contributes is the real means to reduce that stress.

Personal contribution begets money, not the other way around. And that is the very purpose of a free enterprise system. It’s not to create billionaires. It is to enable purpose.

So can our focus be redirected toward purpose and meaning? Yes, but it starts with leaders who acknowledge the changes that are need to enable all of us to excel.

Leaders need to recognize that a compassionate society must create a wealth of opportunities for meaningful work, so that everyone who is capable of contributing can do so. A compassionate society must provide children with education and training that enriches their lives, both with greater ethical understanding and with practical skills that can lead to economic security and inner peace. A compassionate society must protect the vulnerable while ensuring that these policies do not trap people in misery and dependence.

Read The New York Times article.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Happiness Tagged With: Arthur Brooks, charity, Dalai Lama, poverty, purpose, work

Official Poverty Rate Declines in 2015. Can Washington Do More?

September 16, 2016

Over the last two weeks, important new reports were released with good news for poverty fighters across the country: the official poverty rate dropped from 14.8 percent to 13.5 percent in 2015, and both food insecurity and very low food security significantly declined as well.

The fact that we are just now seeing progress, as caseloads for major assistance programs decrease, illustrates that a strengthening economy that gets more Americans working is the most essential ingredient for fighting poverty.

Still, a larger share of Americans remain poor than before the recession started in 2007, even when factoring in all non-cash and tax-based government transfers. This means turning to strategies than can further push down the poverty level.

That’s where Angela Rachidi comes in. Rachidi studies the effects of public policy and existing support programs on low-income families, and makes a convincing case that our focus throughout policy should be on getting more Americans working.

A small fraction of prime-working age people in poverty work full-time, full-year, which means that for most, the lack of a full-time job, not low wages, seems to be the primary driver of poverty.

In a study Rachidi conducted over the summer, she found that:

The vast majority of working-age adults in poverty, whether measured by the official rate or the supplemental rate, lack full-time work, and more than 60 percent in official poverty did not work for pay at all in 2014. In addition, the majority of children in official poverty were in a family without a full-time worker, and 31.3 percent were in a family with no working adult at all. …

As Rachidi explains, most working-age adults in poverty are not working for reasons unrelated to searching for work. They have to do with health issues and home and family responsibilities. In other words, Americans in poverty are frequently not able to look for work or take a job when one is offered. They are not actually resistant to doing work. Addressing those barriers could do more to pull those sitting on the sidelines back into the labor market. But government solutions to reducing poverty are addressing the wrong problem.

Antipoverty policies—such as minimum wage increases, wage subsidies, increasing job availability (including subsidized jobs), and workforce development efforts like education and training—often focus on the working poor or on those actively searching for work. Efforts like these are not well-suited to those who are not even looking for work.

From disability programs to child care assistance to apprenticeship programs, a host of changes could be made to increase employment among low-income Americans, Rachidi argues. Many of these can occur on the state level, where much of federal aid is doled out to be distributed as statewide officials see fit. This is useful in the sense that regional problems don’t need a top-down diktat from Washington.

Check out Angela Rachidi’s suggestions on how to make work more attractive to Americans.

At the same time Rachidi focuses on solutions to address the reasons people are in poverty, Edward Conard argues in his new book, “The Upside of Inequality: How Good Intentions Undermine the Middle Class,” that Americans should be wary of relying on increased income redistribution to help the lower and middle classes move up.

He dismantles major myths about income inequality’s impact on the middle and working classes, including the following:

The myth that the rich get richer by making the poor poorer. No other high-wage economy has done more to help the world’s poor than the US economy. Regardless, advocates of redistribution press on. Rising income inequality is actually the byproduct of an economy that has deployed its talent and wealth more effectively than that of other economies — and not of the rich stealing from the middle and working classes.

The myth that incentives don’t matter. In an innovation-driven economy, there are large and compounding costs to dulling incentives for entrepreneurial risk-taking. As payoffs for success have risen, entrepreneurial risk-taking has accelerated US growth relative to other high-wage economies with more equally distributed incomes. Because of this growth, today, median US household incomes are 15 to 30 percent higher than those in Germany, France, and Japan.

The myth that mobility has declined. If the success of America’s 1 percent comes at the expense of the middle and working classes, we should see mobility declining. Yet, even with significant immigration, there is little evidence that mobility has declined or that mobility in Scandinavia, the supposed paradise of redistribution, is better than in the United States.

The myth that the success of the 1 percent hurts the middle class. Since the financial crisis, accusations that crony capitalism and the success of the 1 percent slow middle- and working-class income growth have only grown louder. The incomes of the very top of the 1 percent have soared, and the growth of middle-class and working-class incomes has remained slow. Many insist that this gap has increased because the wealthy are rigging a zero-sum game to take what rightly belongs to others. Conard addresses these accusations and explains how income redistribution is what hurts the middle and working classes.

Conard says income inequality is not a bad thing in and of itself. It drives competition and entrepreneurial risk-taking. Likewise, a heavy reliance on redistributing the income of those entrepreneurs undercuts those who are willing to invest in training and hiring lesser-skilled workers.

At the same time, Conard argues, reducing regulatory rules that create instability in the banking sector would encourage risk-averse institutions to reengage, compounding and growing the economy at a faster rate.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Happiness Tagged With: Angela Rachidi, Edward Conard, income inequality, poverty, work

The Poverty Debate: Why We Don’t Agree on The Same Set of Facts

September 5, 2016

The political realm is a great place to toil if you aspire to be an armchair pugilist. Without much personally at stake in the outcome of the poverty debate, it is easy to pick a side and argue statistics and facts. But in the midst of all the fighting are real people being impacted by decisions outside of their control.

Such is the case when it comes to arguments between the political scientists of the left and right over welfare reform, and whether those at the bottom rungs are any better off despite numbers showing that millions of people were clearly lifted out of poverty as a result of the 1996 welfare reform law.

To this day, commentators on the left employ bogeyman language for the anti-poverty law — demonizing Newt Gingrich and House Republicans for coming up with legislation that Bill Clinton signed — while at the same time acknowledging that the percentage of people in poverty is demonstrably less than reflected in the antiquated methodology used to determine current poverty levels.

Take the words of Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute:

The official poverty rate is just above 15 percent, about a point larger than it was in 1996. But that measure is misleading, because it doesn’t take into account non-cash benefits and tax subsidies. According to Harvard University’s Christopher Jencks, the absolute poverty rate falls to under 5 percent when adjusted for food and housing, the earned income and children’s tax credit, and a more accurate measure of inflation.

Nonetheless, Jencks and other social policy researchers are concerned about the rise of “deep poverty” — an increase in the percentage of families whose income is less than 50 percent of the official poverty line.

Some liberal analysts blame welfare reform for gouging a huge hole in the social safety net. Even as unemployment soared during the Great Recession, they note, TANF caseloads stayed down. That meant fewer needy families were getting cash assistance when they needed it most.

That’s true, but it’s not the whole story. As cash assistance has shrunk, other forms of social support have grown and become more generous. These include unemployment insurance, food stamps (now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) and disability programs. In fact, some conservatives complain that welfare reform hasn’t made poor single-parent families less dependent on government; it just transferred their dependence to other programs that lack TANF’s strong work requirements.

Marshall notes that welfare reform, courtesy of President Clinton or otherwise, helped reduce the number of people in poverty. The big problem now is the number of women with children who live in “deep poverty,” which is defined as people living on less than half the official poverty rate. Professors Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer recently wrote a book in which they demonstrate that “deep poverty” rose by 2.6 percentage points between 1996 and 2011, from 1.7 to 4.3 percent.

At the same time, however, the Manhattan Institute has released a study contradicting the numbers, while saying something similar to Marshall from a completely opposite perspective.

Practically no children of single mothers were living on $2 a day in either 1996 or 2012 (the latest year for which we have reliable statistics), once the receipt of all government benefits are factored in. In 2012, fewer than one in 1,500 children of single mothers were living in what is called “extreme poverty.” This finding is consistent with other research.

Herein lies the challenge. If both sides agree that “official poverty statistics can create a misleading impression that hardship has increased,” then both sides must get out from beyond their political lens to evaluate not whether welfare reform has been a net positive — it has — but what’s the next step.

Progress is being made. More needs to be done. But the debate must start from the perspective of not what should be done, but whether we can eradicate poverty or whether it will always exist to some extent.

Then it’s a matter of determining how much help is enough to ensure that the least among of us has the means to live in safety and with dignity. This is where agreement is elusive and where next measures stall. Determining what those in deep poverty need, want, and are capable of contributing could go a long way to getting past arguments over whether six in one is equal to a half dozen in the other.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Life Tagged With: poverty, SNAP, TANF, welfare reform

Uninformed America: Global Poverty Down Nearly 60% in 30 Years

September 2, 2016

The percentage of the world living in poverty has declined by nearly 60 percent in the last 30 years, from 52 to 21 percent. That is an astounding number, especially as the world population has risen from 4.933 billion to 7.215 billion in 2015, a 31.6 percent increase, during that same period.

Even extreme global poverty — defined as lack of access to clean water, enough food, sufficient clothing and shelter, or basic medicine like antibiotics,which impacts 1.4 billion people today — has declined from 21 percent in 2011 to 16 percent in 2013.

Despite these facts, 67 percent of Americans said they thought that global poverty had gotten worse over that time period, according to a Barna Group in conjunction with Compassion International, a child advocacy ministry.

Why so pessimistic? Hearing the news each night regularly puts people in a foul mood, but really, it’s a lack of awareness of efforts that have been made. Fortunately, knowledge is power.

Compassion International’s take is that Christians have a responsibility to be involved in helping relieve poverty, and happily reports that many Christians agree. It notes that more Christians donated to anti-poverty causes than the U.S. population as a whole, and donated more cash than non-Christians overall. This is true for Christians over and under 40 years of age.

The survey also found:

Fewer people are likely to have volunteered for a poverty-related cause in the past year. Practicing Christians, however, are still more likely than the general population to have spent time working to end global poverty. Among all adults, 14 percent volunteered for a church and 11 percent volunteered for a non-profit to help the global poor. Among practicing Christians, one-third of those over 40 volunteered at a church to help the global poor and about one-quarter (24 percent) did so at a non-profit. Among those under age 40, 36 percent volunteered at a church to help the global poor and one-fifth (21 percent) did so at a non-profit.

Still, two-thirds of Americans don’t believe that poverty can be eradicated in the next 25 years, despite it dropping so much in such a short time. They fault corruption, the enormity of the problem, government corruption, and an uncoordinated global response among causes of poverty’s persistence.

As research shows, poverty can be eradicated by creating greater opportunity. The freeing of markets across the globe is the most credited reason for poverty’s reduction. In other words, the ability of people to pursue opportunities to build their own livelihood is the single-greatest facilitator in the reduction in poverty.

Read the global poverty perceptions survey here.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Life Tagged With: income inequality, poverty, public opinion, world population

Are Poor People More Optimistic Than Others About Their Futures?

August 18, 2016

Poor people are more likely than non-poor people to think that they will be able to pull themselves out of poverty. Forty-eight percent of the poor say most poor people will remain poor for a long time while 41 percent say poverty is a temporary condition. That compares to 60 percent of people who said that the poor will remain poor for some time.

Meanwhile, 61 percent of Americans, including 64 percent of Americans living in poverty, say that most poor people who receive welfare benefits would rather earn their own living instead of staying on welfare.

Those are some of the findings from a new Los Angeles Times poll, conducted in partnership with The American Enterprise Institute, a top Washington think tank. The poll provides other stark findings about how Americans think about people in poverty.

America’s political parties may want to take note of those findings, particularly because 37 percent of people living in poverty defined themselves as somewhat or very conservative while only 31 percent defined themselves as liberals. Another 24 percent declared themselves moderate.

Only 27 percent of Americans said they believe that conditions for poor people have improved in the last 10 or 15 years while 42 percent say it has gotten worse for poor Americans. Only 13 percent said they believe that the poverty rate has declined in 30 years.

In reality, 14.8 percent of people were living beneath the official poverty line in 2014, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 3 points below the rate that lived in poverty in 1965, the year that President Johnson’s War on Poverty programs began, and 3.3 percentage points higher than in 1985, when the AEI-LA Times study was first conducted.

The 2016 survey mimicked the 1985 survey and demonstrates how (little) opinion has changed over 30 years. The seemingly small differences over that time frame may be due to the fact that little has changed when it comes to public policy — or more exactly, how much change has kept things the same. The pivotal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which is coming up on its 20th anniversary since enactment, shifted responsibility for welfare from the federal government to states, but poverty is more persistent than the “T” in TANF intended.

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities notes that only about half of the federal and state grant money for TANF actually went to “core welfare reform activities” in 2013, in part because “states can use TANF funds much more broadly than the core welfare reform areas of providing a safety net and connecting families to work; some states use a substantial share of funding for … other services and programs.”

So what else do people think of the poor, and how do the poor perceive themselves? Other poll findings that stand out:

Fifty-four percent of people as a whole, and 47 percent of people living in poverty, said they believe that the potential loss of welfare benefits “almost always” or “often” impacts the decision of unmarried people on whether to get married. This is an interesting finding given that much work has been done demonstrating that marriage helps families get out of poverty. It’s notable also that 47 percent of all the people who took the survey reported they are married, but only 23 percent of the people in poverty who answered the poll said they are married.

About 87 percent of Americans — including 81 percent of individuals living below the poverty line — believe that requiring poor people to seek work or participate in a training program in return for benefits is a better approach than providing benefits without asking for anything in return.

Fifty-four percent of people think welfare encourages dependency, down from 59 percent in 1985. On the flip side, more people feel negatively about the way things are going, 67 percent of people, and 66 percent of people who are poor, said they are dissatisfied with the country’s direction. That pairs with the increase in the number of people who say that it’s harder for poor people to find work, up to 57 percent today from 43 percent in 1985.

Seventy-six percent of people, including 71 percent of people in poverty and 80 percent of people not in poverty, said they thought that welfare programs are badly designed or under-funded, and that’s why they have failed to pull people out of poverty.

Thirty-five percent of people said government has the greatest responsibility for helping the poor — that’s twice as high a percentage over those who responded that either churches, charities, families, or the poor themselves have the greatest responsibility.

The entire poll, conducted between June 20 and July 7, 2016, can be viewed here. The survey was conducted among 1,202 adults, including 235 adults living in poverty. The survey oversampled individuals living below the poverty line to get reliable estimates of the views of poor Americans themselves.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Insight, Life Tagged With: Los Angeles Times, poverty, survey, TANF, welfare benefits

Hillbilly Poverty: Trump’s Appeal to Poor Appalachian Whites

July 22, 2016

The discussion of "hillbilly poverty" — a deep and abiding poverty that has been prevalent, but overlooked, for generations in the Appalachian region — seems to keep coming back to the fore, particularly this election season. It may be because white poverty is a blind spot to many Americans who are either white, but don't live in poverty, or are non-white and unaware of or too preoccupied with their own identity struggles to worry about the white underclass. Or maybe most Americans are aware, but feel helpless to do anything about it. read more

Filed Under: Books, Front-Page Feature, Life, News Tagged With: 2016 presidential election, Appalachia, Donald Trump, hillbilly, poverty

The Working Poor: When a Job is a Chore

July 18, 2016

Too few poor Americans work. That may seem obvious, but maybe the reason is not.

The most common explanations given by nonworking, poor adults for why they aren’t employed are family and home responsibilities and disability and illness, not inability to find a job.

The full-time working poor make up only 17 percent of the 46.7 million Americans in poverty in 2014. Meantime, most working-age adults in poverty — 61.7 percent — did not work at all in 2014.

Work is a central part of the American dream. Steady employment supplies income to households, provides opportunities to move up the income ladder, and minimizes the risk of being in poverty. Only 3 percent of adults who work full-time, year-round live in poverty.

More importantly, work is often a source of dignity and purpose and is an important way in which everyone can contribute to society.

While working for pay is something that enables families to thrive and fosters a sense of pride, labor economist Angela Rachidi asserted that “labor force participation rates among prime-age workers have declined over the past two decades, suggesting that America is facing a work problem.”

If not working is a choice, then it may be of little concern to public policy. But when a lack of employment leads to poverty, it raises important questions about the role for government. In many ways, government can make poverty less painful through income transfers, but the important question is whether government can encourage those who are not employed to work and provide for themselves. …

Notably, fewer than 10 percent of nonworkers in poverty reported inability to find work as their reason for not working. This suggests that current economic and workforce development policies, which primarily focus on people already working or looking for work, have limitations. With over 60 percent of poor working-age people not working at all, public policies aimed at increasing work may have stronger effects than these other policies.”

Rachidi looked at people in poverty as described by the federal government’s definition as well as the supplemental poverty measure, which includes government benefits in determining a poor person’s income.

“Ultimately,” she wrote, “the results related to work and nonwork for people in poverty according to both measures were similar, and the conclusions were the same.”

Rachidi suggested that anti-poverty efforts may have to focus on the larger variables that drive people from the workplace, including health issues and family responsibilities, as well as disincentives to work, like those seen in disability insurance programs, which TPOH has previously noted.

Otherwise, Rachidi said, “we can either accept the status quo, which would mean leaving millions of Americans in poverty, or continue funding large government programs that transfer income from working taxpayers to the nonworking poor.”

Neither of these seems like a good option.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Happiness Tagged With: Angela Rachidi, disability insurance, poverty, supplemental income, welfare benefits, work, working poor