poverty

Raising ten children—some biological, others adopted or in foster care—is far from a burden for Sharon Astyk. On the contrary, she says it mandates an artfulness to living, allowing her and her husband to help create something new and greater from the sum of many parts. Sharon writes that the result is "more fascinating, more fun, more engaging [...] a job worth building a life around." While some parenting hurdles multiply with more kids, others stay the same—or even vanish. And beyond the concerns of day-to-day living, Sharon knows she is maintaining and building new family ties for foster…
It’s perhaps not surprising that single parents face a higher risk of living in poverty. However, a new study finds that such risk is much higher for single mothers than for single fathers, even when they both have similar jobs and education levels and work the same number of hours. Recently published in an edition of Gender Issues, the study found that single mothers make significantly less than single fathers. In addition, single mothers seem to be financially penalized for each additional child they have, while income for single fathers remains the same or even increases with each…
Reporter Anna Merlan at Jezebel chronicles the stories of women truck drivers who experienced severe sexual harassment and rape after enrolling in a training program. Her story begins with Tracy (who asked Merlan not to use her last name), who attended a driving school that contracts with Cedar Rapids Steel Transport Van Expedited (CRST), which is among the largest trucking companies in the country. During her training, Tracy was matched with a seasoned trucker who was supposed to help her safely accrue the training hours she needed before she could drive a truck on her own. Merlan reports:…
A few of the recent pieces I've liked: Barbara Ehrenreich at the Guardian: In America, only the rich can afford to write about poverty Victor Yocco at Vox: What it’s like to be a recovering alcoholic in an office where booze is everywhere Mary McKenna at Germination: CDC to Congress: Raise our Budget or Americans Will Die Needlessly Liz Szabo and Laura Ungar at USA TODAY: Family planning budgets in crisis before Planned Parenthood controversy Gabriel Metcalfe at Citylab: What’s the Matter with San Francisco? (“The city’s devastating affordability crisis has an unlikely villain—its famed…
Technically, the recession is over. So it may come as a surprise to learn that more U.S. children are living in poverty right now than during the Great Recession. To be more specific: About 1.7 million more children live in low-income working families than just a few years ago. The new and troubling numbers come from the 2015 Kids Count Data Book, which was released by the Annie E. Casey Foundation earlier this week. The book measures four domains of child well-being in the post-recession years: economic well-being, education, health, and family and community. It also ranks states by overall…
A recent agreement between striking farmworkers and big agribusiness in Baja California could be the “most significant achievement by a farm labor movement in recent Mexican history,” reports Richard Marosi in the Los Angeles Times. Among the settlement details, daily wages for workers will go up by as much as 50 percent and workers will receive the required government benefits often denied by their employers. Marosi reports: “This is a watershed moment,” said Sara Lara, a farm labor researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. In decades of studying farm issues, Lara said she…
Family-friendly policies in the workplace are a good thing, but as Claire Cain Miller writes in The New York Times, there’s also a risk that such policies end up hurting the very workers they’re intended to help. Miller starts off her piece with international examples of family-friendly policies, such as a law in Chile that requires employers provide child care for working mothers and a policy in Spain that gives the parents of young children the option of working part time. The unintended results of each example? All women — whether they have children or not — get paid less and face fewer…
Another day, another study that finds poverty is linked to adverse and often preventable health outcomes. This time, it’s vision loss. Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published new data finding that poverty is significantly correlated with severe vision loss, which is defined as being blind or having serious difficulties seeing even with glasses. In examining data from the American Community Survey, researchers found that among counties in the top quartile for severe vision loss, more than 55 percent were also in the top quartile for poverty. The South is home to…
Do food assistance programs deliver more than food and nutrition? Can relieving the stress of food insecurity provide positive psychological benefits as well? A new study says yes it can. In a study published in the June issue of the American Journal of Public Health, researchers set out to examine whether participating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly referred to as food stamps, was associated with better overall well-being and specifically, lower rates of psychological distress. In analyzing data from the SNAP Food Security survey, the largest longitudinal…
Last November, a roof section larger than a football field collapsed at the Woodgrain Millwork in Prineville, Oregon. Luckily, no one was harmed. However, mill workers, who spoke of a variety of workplace hazards, say they had alerted management to the leaky roof long before the collapse, reported Amanda Peacher for Oregon Public Broadcasting. In 2004, Woodgrain, a global company with manufacturing facilities across the U.S., bought the 14-acre Prineville mill. Noting that each of the 23 former mill workers interviewed for the story described a “roof riddled with leaks,” Peacher writes: Peggy…
If national lawmakers took action on less than a dozen policy fronts, they could reduce child poverty in the U.S. by a whopping 60 percent. In sheer numbers, such a reduction would lift 6.6 million children out of poverty and significantly improve their opportunities for living long and fruitful lives. For the public health field, in particular, targeting poverty — a root determinant of lifelong disease and disability — could put an entire generation on a trajectory toward better health and well-being. Those numbers are from the Children’s Defense Fund, which late last month released “Ending…
Rarely do poverty and optimal health go together. In fact, income is consistently tapped as a major factor underpinning a person’s opportunity to live a long and healthy life. And children don’t fare much better, with low-income children facing increased risks of poor health and development. So, just how many American children face this challenge today? Four out of every 10. This month, researchers at the National Center for Children in Poverty at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health released their annual “Basic Facts about Low-Income Children” fact sheet, which reports that 44…
In The Atlantic, Alana Semuels writes about poor families living in the Atlanta suburbs – one of the many suburban US areas where a growing proportion of residents are struggling to get by. And because poverty has historically been concentrated in cities, that’s where the infrastructure and resources that help low-income residents tend to be located. Suburban residents often find it much harder to access assistance, or to get around if they don't have a car. (Details on trends and local specifics are available from the Brookings Institution.) For instance, Semuels notes that both jobs and…
New data from the U.S. Census Bureau finds that the U.S. poverty rate declined slightly between 2012 and 2013, however the numbers of people living at or below the poverty level in 2013 didn’t represent a real statistical change. Yesterday, the Census Bureau released two annual reports: “Income and Poverty in the United States: 2013” and “Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2013.” The agency found that between 2012 and 2013, the nation’s poverty rate declined from 15 percent to 14.5 percent. But the 45.3 million people living in poverty as of 2013 was not a “statistically…
Last year, the U.S. Census reported that record numbers of people were living in poverty. In fact, the 46.5 million Americans living in poverty as of 2012 was the largest count since the Census began measuring poverty more than 50 years ago. But along with overall poverty numbers, the Census recently reported that concentrated poverty is up, too — and that’s worrisome because it means that more people may face even greater barriers and fewer opportunities to moving out of poverty. The Census Bureau designates any census tract with of a poverty rate of 20 percent or more as a “poverty area.”…
A few of the recent pieces I've liked: Sommer Mathis at CityLab: What If the Best Way to End Drunk Driving Is to End Driving? Dylan Matthews at Vox: More evidence that giving poor people money is a great cure for poverty Tressie McMillan Cottom in the Washington Post: No, college isn’t the answer. Reparations are. Mariya Strauss at Political Research Associates: Dark Money, Dirty War: The Corporate Crusade Against Low-Wage Workers Fred Schulte at The Center for Public Integrity: Why Medicare Advantage costs taxpayers billions more than it should
If you only have time for one long read this week, make it the excellent "Breathless and Burdened" series by Chris Hamby of the Center for Public Integrity. The series website explains, "This yearlong investigation examines how doctors and lawyers, working at the behest of the coal industry, have helped defeat the benefits claims of miners sick and dying of black lung, even as disease rates are on the rise and an increasing number of miners are turning to a system that was supposed to help alleviate their suffering." This is investigative reporting at its finest! Other recent pieces I've…
Wages in the highly profitable fast food industry are so low that more than half of families of front-line fast food workers are enrolled in and depend on public assistance programs to make ends meet. In other words, that seemingly inexpensive burger and fries not only comes with a secret sauce, but a secret cost. According to "Fast Food, Poverty Wages: The Public Cost of Low-Wage Jobs in the Fast Food Industry," which was released last week, the cost of such public assistance is nearly $7 billion every year, with Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Program costs accounting for more than…
A reader sends me a letter and gives me permission to reprint it here, because I suspect he's not the only one with this question: "I think what you are doing with your family is great, but I feel like you've moved away from peak oil and climate change to write about foster care, and I don't see a connection.  I feel bad saying it, but I miss the old stuff.  Is there a connection I'm not seeing?" In some measure this is just a fair cop, in that my subject matter HAS changed as I've spent more time working on issues of families in crisis.  It isn't that I don't have things to say about peak…
A few of the recent pieces I've liked: Brian Beutler in Salon: The $200K lesson I learned from getting shot Sarah Kliff, Sandhya Somashekhar, Lena H. Sun and Karen Tumulty in the Washington Post: How eight lives would be affected by the health law Sendhil Mullainathan in the New York Times: The Mental Strain of Making Do With Less Patricia Sagastume at Al Jazeera America: Dengue fever presence in Florida at a 'pretty serious level' Alan Durning at DC Streetsblog: Apartment Blockers (about how the costs of underground parking contribute to high rents)