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 »

Sunday’s issue of The Oklahoman featured a compelling report by Paula Burkes on the struggles of several Oklahomans who have unexpectedly found themselves among the ranks of the unemployed, losing long-time jobs and struggling to regain their footing in an extremely unforgiving labor market.  Each of the five profiled unemployed workers are struggling to keep themselves and their families afloat, while hoping that their job prospects improve quickly. In the case of Cindy Mason, who was laid-off four months ago after 29 years working for an Oklahoma City church, the change in circumstance has been abrupt and frightening:

“I’m scared spotless,” Mason, a homeowner, said. Given only two months’ severance, she pulled some money from her retirement account, canceled her YMCA membership and other nonessentials from her budget, is working a temporary job and looking like crazy for employment…

“I don’t want to lose my house, want to pay my bills and keep up my insurance,” she said.

The same day, The New York Times ran an opinion column by Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of the 2001 memoir Nickled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. Ehrenreich revisits some of the low-wage workers and communities she profiled in her book and finds that, while the media has tended to focus on the emergence of the “nouveau poor” among those who were previously affluent before the recent economic collapse, for the “already poor” and the “always poor”, this recession has been especially tough.  She cites data showing that blue-collar unemployment is increasing three times as quickly as white-collar unemployment, which is pushing many people who were already scraping to get by during the good times right off the cliff of financial stability.

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