As we recover from the great recession, the need to create jobs is foremost in the minds of the public and the promises of politicians. But if too many jobs don’t pay enough to cover the basic needs of a family, we may only dig ourselves further into a hole and cripple our ability to support the next generation of Americans.

So what is an adequate income to meet those basic needs? The question is important, as it determines how we set goals, determine eligibility for public support, and understand many problems in society. Yet the tool most commonly used to measure this, the federal poverty level (FPL), is long out of date. It considers only cash income and expenses of three times the cost for a 1950s diet.  That was appropriate when the measure was created, as food took up a third of the typical household budget at the time. Today it is less than one-tenth. The measure also does not adjust for differences in the cost of living by region or family type. Read the rest of this entry »

An front-page USA Today article last week reported that government anti-poverty programs – including Medicaid health insurance coverage, food stamps, unemployment benefits and welfare cash assistance – are now assisting one in six Americans and are continuing to expand.  Anyone who has been following the monthly releases of our Numbers You Need bulletin is unlikely to be surprised by the trends reported by USA Today.  Oklahoma continues to see ongoing growth and record caseloads for Medicaid (just under 695,000 recipients) and food stamps (over 585,000), with fewer individuals receiving cash payments for unemployment benefits (weekly average of 36,000 initial and continuing claims) and TANF (21,640).

It so happened that USA Today published its report the day before the Oklahoma Asset Building Coalition held the first of five regional meetings around the state. These gathering are bringing together a diverse group of stakeholders to talk about  challenges facing low- and moderate-income Oklahomans and strategies for achieving economic security. The meeting began with a presentation on the Oklahoma Self-Sufficiency Standard, a tool for calculating the amount of income that families of different sizes and compositions need to meet their basic household expenses – housing, food, child care, transportation, health care, taxes and miscellaneous – without public or private support or subsidies. For a single working adult with one infant and one preschool child, the hourly self-sufficiency wage is $16.43 an hour in Cherokee County and over $21.63 an hour in Tulsa County. For a two-parent family with kids that age, each working adult would need to make $10.28 an hour in Cherokee County and $12.39 an hour in Tulsa to meet its basic needs. It’s worth mentioning that this is a basic family budget with an austere set of assumptions – it includes no meals out or entertainment, no one-time purchases, no loan payments or money put aside for savings. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, the Oklahoma Asset Building Coalition(OkABC) convened a gathering of some 75 individuals from the non-profit sector and from state, local, and tribal government agencies for a day-long meeting on “Economic Security for Oklahomans: Asset Building Approaches for Assisting Families with Low Incomes”. The meeting flowed out of a series of regional listening sessions held over the past month, which brought people together in Tahlequah, Enid, Lawton, Hugo, Oklahoma City, and Shawnee to discuss the major challenges that individuals, families, and communities face in achieving economic security.

While the Coalition has a particular focus on how assets – whether tangible, financial, or personal – can help move people towards economic security, the barriers identified as standing in people’s way to being economically secure were far-ranging. Educational attainment, unstable families, lack of jobs, and substance abuse were most frequently cited over the course of the listening sessions as creating obstacles to success. Looking at existing programs and policies, the most significant gaps were seen to be in the areas of housing, system coordination and communication, and asset accumulation policies. Education, employment, substance abuse, and prisoner re-entry were also identified by many participants as areas where current programs and policies fell short.

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