Poverty Hitting One in Six Californians

The economic recovery in California has not reached a sizable percentage of the population, with more than 16% of Californians living in poverty, according to an analysis released Tuesday by the California Budget and Policy Center.

In most California counties, the poverty rate increased from 2007 to 2014. Of the 40 California counties with available data, 32 had higher poverty rates last year than they did in 2007 before the state's recession began, the study said.

The California Budget and Policy Center is a not-for-profit that conducts independent, nonpartisan budget analysis.

"Millions of Californians continue to struggle to meet their basic needs, even after several years of steady job gains," the study said. "Poverty remained widespread even though the state's unemployment rate declined from a high of 12.2% in 2010 to 7.5% in 2014."

The federal poverty line is about $19,000 for a family of three. The overall rate fell slightly between 2012 and 2014 -- by 0.6% -- but the 2014 level of 16.4% is a full 4 percentage points higher than it was in 2007.

The study highlighted the differences between counties:

• Not only was the poverty rate higher in 32 of the 40 counties with available data from 2007 to 2014, but there was no statistically significant difference in poverty rates in the other 8 counties;
• In Lake County, the poverty rate rose to 25.9% of the population. In Kings County, 26.6% live in poverty;
• In Lake, Kings and San Bernardino counties, the poverty rate jumped by more than 8 percentage points from 2007 to 2014; and
• In 15 other counties, poverty rates in 2014 were 4 to 8 percentage points higher than in 2007. Most of those counties are in the Central Valley and in the Sacramento region.

"Many factors could contribute to the uneven recovery across California's counties," fact sheet author Alissa Anderson wrote. "These include differences in the availability of well-paying jobs and/or of sufficient work hours, as well as changes in county demographics, such as whether large numbers of people who struggle to get by move into a county."

By David Gorn
Via http://www.californiahealthline.org/capitol-desk/2015/12/poverty-hitting-one-in-six-californians

Infographic: Why you must support the Mitchell Plan

Recently we wrote a blog post letting you know about the Mitchell Plan, an admirable proposal by Assemblymember Holly Mitchell to increase the meager CalWORKs cash grant. Currently, the maximum cash grant for a family of three—a mother and two children—is $638 per month.
Assemblymember Mitchell recommends that the CalWORKs grant be increased by 12 percent starting January 1, 2014, with subsequent annual adjustments of 4.5 percent until the total grant a family can receive is at 50 percent of the Federal Poverty Line. For a family of three, the proposed maximum grant would be $814.*

At this very moment, the Mitchell Plan is being discussed and negotiated in Sacramento and a decision will be reached by June 15, 2013. We’re nervous because the Assembly supports the Mitchell Plan, while the Senate and the Governor have yet to be convinced.
This life-saving plan is a turning point that we’ve all been working toward. The Great Recession has made life very difficult for California’s poor children and families and this plan is a decisive step in the right direction.

We must make sure that the Mitchell Plan survives the negotiations in Sacramento. We have a week to convince our senators and the Governor to reinvest into CalWORKs. Our children need us—they are the main beneficiaries of this program. And we need your help to spread the word about the Mitchell Plan and its importance.

To help you understand Assemblymember Mitchell’s plan and to help explain CalWORKs, we created an infographic that shows, plain and simple, that children are the main recipients of CalWORKs; that CalWORKs takes up only a fraction of our state’s budget (but has suffered disproportionate cuts over the last three years—more than $700 million in cuts); and that CalWORKs grants today are worth HALF of what they were worth 25 years ago. (Scroll down to see instructions for sharing the infographic.)

If you take away anything from this infographic, let it be this: Children and families on CalWORKs today receive the same cash amount as they did 25 years ago. But what about inflation? What about the rising cost of living? How are families supposed to pay rent and bills?  

In addition to the infographic, we created a very informative CalWORKs fact sheet. Please read it to learn how CalWORKs benefits children, families and our state economy: Why CalWORKs Matters: Helping Women and Children Move Out of Poverty.

Please SHARE this infographic WIDELY with your friends and networks. If your social share reaches and informs just one more person, we will have made a difference.

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The Women’s Foundation of California supports the Mitchell Plan to increase the CalWORKs cash grant by 12%. Want to know why YOU need to support this plan? Check out this infographic and please LIKE it and SHARE it!

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• What is the Mitchell Plan and why support it? »Tweet this «
• We need to shatter the welfare mom myth. »Tweet this«
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• Today’s CalWORK’s cash grant is the same as it was in 1988! »Tweet this«
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* Federal Poverty Line for a family of three is $19,530, meaning that 50% is $9,765. To be at 50% of Federal Poverty Line, a family of three would need to receive $814/month.

Via www.womensfoundca.org

California is Richest, Poorest State

It’s fair to say that California is the richest state in the nation. We have more millionaires than any other state, and mansions dot our coastal bluffs and inland canyons.

But California is also, arguably, the poorest state in the nation. We have more people in poverty — 6.1 million — and more children in poverty than any other state.

Even more ominously, a new measure of poverty shows that California has the highest percentage of its population living below the poverty line.

By the traditional measure, California’s poverty rate is 16.6 percent, 20th in the nation. But the new, supplemental measure released last year by the Census Bureau puts California at the top of the list with a poverty rate of 23.5 percent.

Unlike the official measure, the supplemental poverty measure reflects the cost of living – including housing – in a state and also reflects transfer payments such as food and housing subsidies and tax credits.

By either measure, though, it is clear that California has a lot of poor people, far more than its glittering image would suggest.

Part of this is a reflection of our diversity, and the character of our recent population growth. We are a state of immigrants, and the wave of immigration from Latin America that peaked in the 1990s brought millions of desperately poor people to California.

These immigrants were not just penniless, but many also had little formal education. They had very little capacity to work in any job outside of agriculture and menial labor. They were, largely, stuck at the bottom rung of the economic ladder. Their lives here might have been better than the conditions they left behind, but still they formed a large and stubborn bubble in the state’s poverty numbers.

Immigration also helps explain the regional differences in poverty in California. Immigrants tended to concentrate in counties where agriculture was big and the cost of living was low. A look at the poverty numbers by county shows the contrast.

The counties with the lowest poverty rates (using the traditional measure) are generally those near the coast, places like Marin, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties. Some foothill counties are also on this list: Placer and El Dorado near Lake Tahoe, and Calaveras County in the Gold Country.

On the other extreme are, for the most part, counties in the Central Valley and other agricultural regions. In Merced County, more than one-quarter of the households have incomes below the poverty line. The situation is similar in Fresno, Kern, Tulare and Imperial counties. In fact, three of the five most impoverished metropolitan areas in the nation are in the Central Valley.

The numbers also show the connection between poverty and family structure. Families headed by a single parent are much more likely to be living in poverty. In the ten counties with the lowest poverty rates, 25 percent of families have a single parent. But in the ten counties with the highest poverty rates, 36 percent of the families are headed by one parent. And in those counties, more than half the families with a single mother are living in poverty.

Education is also correlated with poverty. The counties with the lowest high school drop out rates, like Placer, Calaveras, Marin and El Dorado, also tend to have the lowest poverty rates. And the same is true in reverse: some of the poorest counties, like Kings, San Joaquin, Yuba and Fresno, also have some of the highest rates of high school drop outs. It’s not clear whether failing to complete high school causes poverty or is caused by it, or both, but the two are definitely related.

The good news for California is that second-generation immigrants tend to be better educated than their parents, speak English better, and are less likely to be living in poverty. By the third generation, the gap between the grandchildren of immigrants and other Californians becomes shrinks even further. So with immigration having peaked in the early 1990s, time will slowly make at least a dent in these numbers.

But California still has a long way to go. As the economy improves and the wealthy and middle-income people see their situations improve, the state needs to be careful not to sustain a forgotten underclass.

Especially in the Central Valley, but in pockets of poverty throughout the state, we need a concerted, focused effort to change the things that are correlated with poverty — from high school drop-outs to single parenthood.

That won’t eliminate poverty. But if every child born here at least has an equal chance to join the economic mainstream, that would be a big start.

via Fox & Hounds: Keeping Tabs on California Business & Politics http://www.foxandhoundsdaily.com/2013/05/california-is-richest-poorest-state/