February 3, 2009

Joy Moses
The Center for American Progress
Click here to access this issue brief, with linked sources, on CAP’s website.

Basic Needs Assistance for the Poor Advances Economic Recovery and Employment Goals

The current recession is associated with sharp rises in unemployment and underemployment, leaving families with fewer resources to address their most basic needs—food, heat, and shelter. These circumstances have led Congress and President Obama to consider including additional funds for emergency assistance programs within proposals for economic recovery legislation—the recently passed H.R. 1 and still pending Senate version that will soon head to a conference committee.

Helping low-income families and individuals is reason enough to expand funding for these programs, but providing for these basic needs also helps the entire nation by advancing economic recovery and employment goals.

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February 2, 2009

In introducing the middle class tax force on Friday, President Obama drew attention to the need to expand the middle class and to address poverty:

“[W]hen I talk about the middle class, I’m talking about folks who are currently on the middle class, but also people who aspire to be in the middle class. We’re not forgetting the poor. They are going to be front and center, because they, too, share our American Dream.”

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February 2, 2009—

If you don’t act now, the Obama economic recovery plan, which creates and saves millions of jobs, protects people from hardship, and invests in shared prosperity, could be derailed.

Please join a national call today, Feb. 2 at 4pm eastern time (3pm central, 2pm mountain, 1pm pacific).

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The Center for Law and Social Policy has released Target Practice: Lessons on Poverty Reduction. Target Practice is a resource tool for poverty advocates and policymakers who are considering or who have established a target to reduce poverty.

Poverty targets are a relatively new phenomenon, but policy targets are widely used. In Target Practice, CLASP examines current policy targets in other areas and draws from this analysis a set of lessons for poverty reduction.

Click here to download this publication.

Lucia Mutikani
Reuters

WASHINGTON – Chaun Frost ran up her credit cards when the U.S. economy was booming, and now the single mother is paying a heavy price.

To service her debt and buy food for her two children, she has taken a second job selling pizza on weekends and some week nights, supplementing the $2,200 a month she earns from her job coordinating volunteers at a children’s hospital.

“We have been hurt by the current state that the economy is in,” said Frost, 32. “I am part of the new working poor.”
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With hard times facing so many, what do Americans think about taking action to fight poverty?

In a Gerstein/Agne poll for Half in Ten conducted shortly after the election, more than three quarters of respondents said that cutting poverty in half in the next ten years should be a national goal. A majority reaffirmed that this should be true even if it means more government spending, or more regulation of business. And there was agreement across ideology, age, and race that “the negative consequences of poverty affect all of us” as opposed to “mostly those living in poor neighborhoods,” with 77% of respondents preferring the first option. Further evidence that the problem of poverty strikes close to home for many: 52% said that either they themselves or a member of their immediate family was poor, up from 36% who answered the question that way in a 2001 Pew survey.

Click here to download a slideshow with additional survey results.

Click here to download Gerstein/Agne memo on the survey.

By Mary Clare Jalonick
The Associated Press

President-elect Barack Obama’s pick for secretary of agriculture says that if he is confirmed he will work to boost the economies of farm communities, promote nutritious foods and help poor families put meals on the table.

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Last month, the Half in Ten campaign partners wrote the following letter to the transition team. Click here to download a pdf file of the letter.

Dear Members of the Transition Team:

On behalf of Half in Ten, a campaign to reduce poverty in the US, we write to urge you to support an economic recovery package that will rebuild our economy from the bottom up. The recovery package should include measures that put money in the pockets of the hardest pressed, help them find jobs and expand the number of good jobs in the US economy, and take into account that those who are already vulnerable are often the first, and most, injured in difficult times.

Absent dramatic action, if unemployment reaches 9 percent, poverty in the US could increase by 7.5 to 10.3 million people or more. Unemployment is increasing across the board, but it has gone up particularly sharply for young workers, for less educated workers, and for people of color. The unemployment rate for workers with less than a high school diploma, for example, was 10.5% in November, compared to a 3.1% rate for those with college degrees. In addition, the basic safety net today is weaker than it was in the early 80s when last we experienced a serious and extended economic downturn, leaving the lowest income people particularly vulnerable.

Reducing poverty is crucial to our long term economic health, and in the present crisis we should focus both on preventing more people from falling into poverty, and on creating opportunities for more equitable and inclusive growth in the future. Economists agree that targeting stimulus dollars to lower income people who will spend them in their communities to meet daily needs is a particularly effective use of funds; Moody’s Economy.com, for example, argues that a dollar spent on unemployment insurance generates $1.64 in GDP growth, and a dollar spent on food stamps generates $1.73 in GDP growth. The economic crisis requires swift action, but it is also important to spend recovery dollars wisely and fairly.

We think the following principles and policies are particularly important:

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Melody Barnes, President-elect Obama’s choice for director of the Domestic Policy Council, delivered a keynote address at LCCR’s recent national board meeting that affirmed the new administration’s commitment to cut poverty in half.

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by the Center for American Progress’s Alexandra Cawthorne

The U.S. Conference of Mayors released on Friday the results of its 2008 Hunger and Homelessness Survey, which surveys 25 major cities. The report adds to this year’s grim economic news, finding that hunger and homelessness have grown significantly in a number of cities over the last year, especially among working families with children. Read more »