Find 2008 poverty data for your congressional district.

The Census Bureau released data throughout September that revealed growing poverty in 2008, spelling hard times for families who were struggling even before the recession. Half in Ten: The Campaign to Cut Poverty in Half in Ten Years and the Center for American Progress Action Fund have organized this data by congressional district, with additional breakdowns on child poverty, women in poverty, and poverty among racial minorities.

“This data offers lawmakers a more detailed look into the growing poverty rates among their own constituents,” said Melissa Boteach, manager of the Half in Ten Campaign. “We look forward to working with Congress and the administration to advance the necessary policies to help those most in need during this time of economic turmoil while laying the groundwork for a shared economic recovery” emphasized Boteach.

On September 29, the government released the latest batch of data, which showed how states and localities were affected during the recession’s first year. However, the data does not incorporate the sharp increase in the unemployment rate, which averaged 5.8 percent last year and is expected to average 9.3 percent in 2009 according to the Economic Policy Institute. Read more »

Alexandra Cawthorne of Center for American Progress and Melissa Boteach of Half in Ten write for the The Hill’s Congress Blog about the importance of extending Unemployment Insurance Benefits as soon as possible.

According to the National Employment Law Project, every day 7,000 additional workers are running out of unemployment benefits. That means that since the House passed its bill to extend unemployment insurance on September 22, approximately 266,000 workers have been left high and dry while the Senate continues to delay a vote on this crucial legislation—and 7,000 workers yesterday, 7,000 workers today, and 7,000 workers every day that the Senate puts off this vote are being pushed closer and closer to this brink.

It will be difficult to create a policy goal to cut poverty in half, without an accurate measurement of who is actually in poverty.  The current poverty measure just doesn’t cut it.  It has been in use since 1959 and fails to account for changing living expenses, regional differences in price, and many of the forms of income assistance that can pull people out of poverty. On June 17, 2009, Rep. McDermott (D-WA) reintroduced the Measuring American Poverty (MAP) Act of 2009, or H.R. 2909. Read more »

This January, Half in Ten joined with the National Employment Law Project,  NELP, to urge Congress to include urgent reforms to the Unemployment Insurance system in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or ARRA.  The antiquated unemployment insurance system had failed to ensure equal benefits for low-wage workers, part-time workers, workers who left work due to “compelling family reasons,” and long-term unemployed individuals.  Low-wage workers are only one-third as likely to collect unemployment benefits, even though they have double the chances of being unemployed.  For this reason, UI reform was one of the 12 steps that the Center for American Progress Task Force on Poverty identified to cut poverty in half in ten years.

Congress listened to advocates, and included unemployment reform in ARRA, allocating $7 billion for the project. And these reforms have begun to reach unemployed workers across the country.  Earlier this week, the National Employment Law Project (NELP) released a report (PDF) detailing the “unprecedented wave” of unemployment insurance reforms that has swept across the country since the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) became law on February 17th, 2009.   Read more »

From Coalition on Human Needs, a Half in Ten partner:

When Congress passed its Budget Resolution on April 27, it generally endorsed the President’s priorities.  The Budget Resolution only answers some of the year’s policy-making questions:  what, and, at least as far as the annual appropriations bottom line is concerned, how much.  Advocates were pleased with the “what” answers:  Congress committed to grapple with comprehensive health care reform and climate change, two of the President’s top priorities.  The Budget Resolution also commits Congress to many other legislative tasks, including reauthorizing child nutrition programs, making student loans cheaper by reducing the role of private lenders, and creating a home visiting programfor new parents, as the President proposed. 

Read more »

Building efficiency retrofits serve the triple benefits of mitigating global warming emissions, reducing energy bills, and creating good, local jobs. Residential buildings alone account for 21percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and substantial efficiency savings are obtainable through easy and proven techniques. Yet if energy-efficiency retrofits offer such obvious environmental, economic, and employment benefits, why have they been so slow to materialize? The answer lies in a host of market failures, and developing viable, scalable solutions has proven challenging—until now.

On Friday, May 15, Half in Ten joined the Center for American Progress and the Center for Working Families to release a report that provides a policy roadmap for New York State to achieve mass-scale, energy-efficiency retrofits of 1 million housing units over the next five years.

Download the report (pdf)

Download the executive summary (pdf)

Watch the event

Rabbi Steve Gutow and Melissa Boteach of the Jewish Council of Public Affairs wrote for the Washington Post’s On Faith section on the religious importance of gaining an accurate picture of poverty.

Our ability to gauge how many people are really left behind in our society is reduced to a simple and outdated statistic. This would not do if we looked at people as they are and not as they were… if we put faces to our numbers… if we followed the message of the book of Numbers.

While the inadequacies of the federal poverty measure may seem like a technical and wonky issue, how we determine the factors of poverty will wind up enabling us to conquer the reality of poverty. 

Read more here

In her May 7th column, “Essential Legal Services“, Joy Moses – a policy analyst with the Center for American Progress – highlights the legal challenges poor and lower-income families face in a recession, among these being foreclosure, landlord-tenant disputes, and government assistance eligibility. Unemployment projections due out later this week are expected to be the worst since this recession began in 2007. As such, she argues, the Obama administration and Congress must take appropriate steps to ensure the Legal Services Corporation has adequate funding this year and going forward. State and federal authorities looking to ‘trim the fat’ ought to be chastened by the fact that recessions tend to affect these two groups disproportionately and therefore, cuts to legal programs would merely exacerbate the effects of hard times on the hard-hit.

Half in Ten partner and Executive Director at the Center for Human Needs, Deborah Weinstein, participated in a recent event hosted by The New School, where poverty experts squared off, debating the merits of President Obama’s efforts – namely, the ARRA and his 2010 budget proposal – to curb and eventually reduce poverty in the long run.  Although the event was largely focused on poverty initiatives in New York City, panelists were urged to consider their applicability nationwide. Weinstein’s daughter – a professional animator and audience member – has an amusing take on the discussion. Click here to see it.

In accordance with federal standards, Kansas has just passed into law SB 160, raising the minimum wage – formerly the lowest in the country – from $2.65 an hour to $7.25. The wage increase goes into effect January 1, 2010. To read more about this and reactions from the Governor’s and State Minority Leader’s offices, click here.