That's the finding of a study published this week by PathWays. (Story here.) It uses the methodology of the Self-Sufficiency Standard Studies, which calculate, for various configurations of families, a localized cost of living, by county, one state at a time. The 2008 Self-Sufficiency Standard Study for PA is available online at http://pathwayspa.org/Self_Sufficiency_Standard.pdf, and I commend it to your attention.
Initially, this was done for families of working age, and to date, studies have been done in about 35 states. More recently, a similar study was done to determine the cost of living in retirement in various places in Pennsylvania; that study is Elder Economic Security Standard. It looks a several different living situations: in a rented home, in a home whose mortgage has been paid off, for a single elderly person and a married couple.
The new study, entitled Overlooked and Undercounted, calculates how many people live in families whose incomes are below the SSS level; that is, where there is not enough to meet all the most simply defined needs: safe housing; childcare for young children while all parents work; homemade food at the USDA Low-Cost Food Plan level, transportation, health care, plus an allowance of 10% of the subtotal of those first 5 categories for "all other" spending, plus a calculation of the taxes that would need to be paid to NET that level of income after the local combination of taxes due from a renter would be paid. That is the Self Sufficiency Standard. It is quite a bit higher than the Federal Poverty Guideline in most large cities; and even in America's lowest-cost-of-living counties, is somewhat above the FPG (which, for 2009, is $18,310 for a family of three and $22,050 for a family of four. ("Self-Sufficiency" means not depending on subsidies or help from relatives with childcare.)
The most striking table to me is Table 7, on page 15, and it is striking both for what it says, and for the calculation they failed to provide. Table 8 provides useful detail.
- As noted in the headline, 21% of PA's working-age families live below the SSS for their family configuration in their county.
- Among families with no children, only 15% live below their SSS.
- Among families with children (who represent 41% of families), 29% live below their local SSS.
- Among families with 1 child, 21% live below their SSS
- Among families with 2 children, 26%
- Among families with 3 children, 43%
- Among families with 4 or more children, 71% live below their local SSS.
- Among families whose youngest child is less than 6 years old, 40% live below the SSS
- Among families whose youngest child is 6 to 17, 21% live below the SSS.
So among families without children, only 1 in 6 lack sufficient income to meet their most simply defined needs. (In America!!) That proportion doubles to nearly 3 in 10 among families with a child.
What they failed to calculate was what percentage of PA's children live below the SSS. I made one assumption: that among families with 4 or more children, the average number of children was 4.5. I have no way of testing its validity. But if you accept that assumption, here's what we find:
- 918,273 children in PA live below the SSS in their county for their particular configuration of family
- That's 35.3% of Pennsylvania's 2,603,590 children.
Table 8 breaks out similar data by whether the household is headed by a married couple, a male or a female householder with no spouse present. Working the same methodology (assuming 4.5 children per household where the table says "4 or more"), I find
- a total of 925,914 children living below local SSS.
- 50.5% of them are in two-parent households.
When you see a child in PA who comes from a family of 4 or more children, chances are that they live below the SSS.
When you see a child in PA who comes from a family headed by a female householder, no spouse present, changes are that they live below the SSS.
When you see a child in PA, the chances are over 1 in 3 that he lives in a family whose income is below the SSS.
Now here's the question: which of these statistics will you remember most?
Followed closely by "what do we need to change?"
If your answer is "fewer single mothers" or "fewer single parents" or "fewer divorces" or even "more availability of birth control" then evidently you are willing to accept that, among married-couple households with 2 children, our wage structure is acceptable when 17% of those families lack sufficient income to meet their most simply defined needs.
GO TO THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM. Discover the problem and eradicate it. I'm persuaded that the problem is structural, not a failing of the individuals involved. We need to look at why wages are not sufficient to support a family.
Oh, and if you think this is just Pennsylvania, think again. The figures are similar for Colorado (34.5%) and for Connecticut (38%). And in California, more than 48& of the children live in families with insufficient income. (I'm willing to bet that much of this is a function of awesomely high rents in the populated portions of California. And ultimately, that can be traced in significant part to distortions produced by Proposition 13.)
Spending more on schools is not going to fix this. WE MUST GO TO THE ROOT of it. Read Henry George's Progress and Poverty, and you will come away knowing what most people 120 years ago knew well. (That would be progress!) And then act on it. Act locally, act at the state level, act at the federal level to implement HG's simple and just reform.
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