Poverty

In a recent blog post, I explored how new poverty data demonstrate the necessity of maintaining important safety net programs. Social Security, the federal Earned Income Tax Credit, and SNAP (food stamps) have played an important role in keeping millions out of poverty and lessening the severity of poverty for millions more. However, another important part of the safety net, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF – the program that replaced welfare in 1996), has been less effective during these difficult economic times. TANF provides block grants to states to fund cash assistance, work supports, and other services for low-income children and parents. This post will begin to explore how and why TANF has failed to respond to a continuing economic crisis for women and families. Read more »

For more about state poverty and wage numbers, please go to our overview page on the state-by-state 2010 Census data.

NWLC’s calculations of just released state-by-state Census poverty data reveal more grim news about the hard times facing America’s women and families.

In 2010 roughly half of female-headed families with children were poor in Mississippi (51.2 percent), Alabama (49.3 percent), West Virginia (48.7 percent) and Kentucky (48.5 percent), and in five more states (Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Ohio, and South Carolina), their poverty rates topped 45 percent.   Read more »

This morning, President Obama released a deficit reduction plan that calls for $1.5 trillion in new revenues from the country’s richest individuals and corporations. Thankfully President Obama recognizes that we can’t let millionaires and billionaires enjoy tax breaks that make our deficit larger and put the burden of debt on the most vulnerable Americans. Read more »

The release of new poverty data this week naturally leads us to focus on the bad news: 46.2 million people in poverty in 2010, including 17.2 million women and 16.4 million children; record numbers of women and families living in extreme poverty (i.e., below half the poverty line, which is just $11,157 for a family of four); and the highest income gap ever recorded between those in the bottom tenth and those in the top tenth. But the new data also offers an opportunity to reflect on the positive impact that the safety net has had: Social Security alone prevented 20.3 million more people (including 1.1 million children) from falling into poverty last year. Read more »

NWLC has been crunching numbers all week long on the newly released poverty data for 2010. Our full report on the numbers was released today. The poverty data provides us with a sobering reminder of the real economic hardship felt by families throughout the country and the urgent need for action to create jobs now. Read more »

Trust me: it's no fun being the bearer of bad news.

I recently told you that since the recession officially ended, women's unemployment rates have actually increased. But that's not the only grim reality: today the Census Bureau released new data, and NWLC's analysis finds that record numbers of women are living in poverty — and extreme poverty. Read more »

Did you know that over 904,000 children were served by Head Start in 2009? Or that college graduation rates for women have increased by over twenty percentage points between 1970 and 2009 but that nearly 13 percent of women still don’t graduate from high school? Or that, despite working full-time, year-round, 1,168,000 women still lived in poverty in 2008?

All of this information can be found from the Census Bureau’s Statistical Abstract of the United States. Read more »