Yes -- there is a Connecticut angle on this ... keep reading!
Link: http://www.cclponline.org/pubfiles/SelfSufficiency08_FinalProof.pdf
The
newest Self Sufficiency Standard Study was published recently, for
Colorado. The SSS is a detailing of a no-frills cost of living which
meets all the most simply defined needs but provides no frills. I've
spent a lot of time on most of the 30+ studies (mostly on one state at
a time; a few on a major metropolitan area), and have mixed feelings
about them. On the one hand, they are probably the best assessment
we've got the cost of a the-very-bottom-of-lower-middle-class lifestyle
in various places in the US. They use a consistent and logical
methodology and tailor the findings to various configurations of
families. So far, very good and useful.
(Just for juxtaposition ... as I'm writing this, I'm listening to / watching the Metropolitan Opera's production of Hansel and Gretel, which I last saw as a child, on PBS. The portrayal of the travails of the working poor parents and the hungry latchkey kids is striking. Great production, in English, with subtitles -- I commend it to your attention, though I'm not sure I'd want a youngster to watch it.)
Where the SSS studies lose me is that they seem to propose a lot of programs to bring the incomes of those whose incomes fall below self-sufficiency up, rather than seeking to change the structures that produce the low wages in the first place. This 2008 one does the same, but has added a section about macro approaches to raising incomes. A step in the right direction, though I don't place much hope in the particular macro approaches they name.
The SSS studies do one thing very well: they demonstrate the no-frills cost of living for various configurations of families -- including housing (at the HUD Fair Market Rent level, usually the 40th percentile of the local rental market), childcare (appropriate to the ages of the child or children), food (USDA "low-cost" food plan, which in January, 2008, allows $2.03 per person per meal for a family of 4 with two school-age children), health care (insurance, through an employer), transportation (a paid-for car, driven the typical local commute, plus one shopping trip per week). To the sum of these five categories, they add 10%, to account for all other purchases -- clothing, laundry and cleaning, furniture, diapers, hygiene items. Then the taxes that a renting household would be paying on that net income are added, offset by whatever tax credits they might be eligible for. The result is the income a family or individual needs just to "get by" -- no frills (i.e., no entertainment, no meals out, no gifts, no savings, no debt repayment or interest payments, no tuition).
This resulting figures are far higher than the Federal Poverty Guideline.
For example, for a family of 4 in 2008, the FPG is $21,200. For the
first county in the appendix, Boulder County, the SSS for a family of 4
with an infant and a preschooler, the SSS is $66,528; for a couple with
a preschooler and a schoolage child, $60,850. In the next, El Paso
Couny (Colorado Springs, home of the Air Force Academy), the
corresponding figures are $52,213 and $49,383. In Denver County,
$50,503 and $45,947. Douglas County, part of the Denver metro, $70,478
and $63,888. Pueblo County, $47,887 and $42,765. Sedgwick County,
$37,810 and $36,685. The lowest of these is 173% of the FPG;
the highest (perhaps not even the highest in the state), the highest
is 332% of the FPG.
One of the other innovations related to the SSS studies, though not embedded in them, is that recently some of the organizations which have sponsored them have subsequently published a second study which quantifies how many people in the particular state live below the SSS for their particular family configuration and location. The Census Bureau tells us how many people have incomes under the FPG -- the figure is around 13.5% nationally. Now the SSS sponsoring groups are starting to calculate what percentage of working-age families live between the FPG and the SSS level.
And from that I've made an assumption or two and calculated the percentage of the children who live below the SSS. A telling figure. (Colorado published such a study last year based on the 2004 SSS study, entitled "Overlooked and Undercounted." By my calculations, 9.8% of Colorado's children were below the FPG, and 24.9% of them were above FPG and below SSS -- which means that 34.5% -- over 1/3 -- of Colorado's children live in families with income insufficient to meet their most simply defined needs.
A similar study was done for Connecticut for 2005, and here, 38% of the children lived under the SSS, and even for married-couple families, the figure was 18% of their children (Table 7).
Tell me again about "No Child Left Behind." Tell me again about how teachers are supposed to be able to teach effectively when a significant proportion of the children in their classrooms live in families with income insufficient to meet all the basic needs, much less provide any extras that we acknowledge as "middle class."
How do we fix this? It is going to take radical reform -- reform
which will increase wages and bring down the cost of housing and of
commercial property, and unburden the economy, and reduce the taxes
paid by those who own no property. Elsewhere on this blogsite, I've
talked about that reform, so I won't go into it in this post.
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