More than 40% of households are less than three months from poverty
by Laura Clawson
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/01/31/1060311/-More-than-40-of-households-are-less-than-three-months-from-poverty?via=blog_1
While the official poverty rate in 2010 was 15.1 percent, there's a lot of controversy over how poverty should be measured, and still more over how we should view proximity to poverty, the people who aren't poor but are dangerously close to it. Here's another way of looking at that. The Corporation for Enterprise Development has released its annual assets and opportunity scorecard, scoring the states on how well they promote household financial security through jobs, education, health care, housing and financial assets. Do states support very small businesses? Do they provide quality public education and incentives to college savings? Do they have a minimum wage above the federal minimum and provide cost of living adjustments? Do they provide tax credits to low-income families and prohibit predatory payday lenders?
The scorecard finds that the asset poverty rate of American households is 27.1 percent—these families don't have enough savings or other assets to subsist at the poverty level for three months if they lost their income, even if they were able to liquidate every asset they had in that time. Liquid asset poverty, a measure that excludes hard-to-get-rid-of things like houses and cars, is still higher, at 43.1 percent. That means a great many people who are working now, who aren't showing up on traditional poverty measures, are leading incredibly fragile lives and could easily be thrown into poverty by any crisis. As with almost every measure of this kind, there are huge racial gaps—34.1 percent of white households are in liquid asset poverty, in contrast to 64.6 percent of households of color.
These things don't just happen in isolation, as the scorecard shows. States can take action through policy to make it easier for low-income people to save money, strengthen their financial position, educate their children. Expanded eligibility to Medicaid or access to COBRA coverage can mean that a medical crisis doesn't become a financial devastation. But too few states do adopt the policies that would help families achieve the security to weather a job loss or medical crisis or to help their kids get the education to achieve greater security themselves.
Assets & Opportunity Scorecard, the leading source for data on household financial security and policy solutions.
http://assetsandopportunity.org/scorecard/
Click on a state to see data, or check out the issue areas listed below.
= new reply since forum marked as read
They are much more adept at dodging issues than "responding" to any of them.
As a matter of fact, they purposely avoid "responding" to anything.
They react, and always badly, but it strikes a chord in their ignorant reactive base...you know...the kind who start a trailer-park murder spree over "whose dog shit on my trailer porch?"
To "respond" would imply "thought", and everyone KNOWS that "thinking" starts with "th" and just SOUNDS gay to begin with.
Plus it's what "per-fessers" do, so that raaa-ht dere mayks it fuukken gay az hayl.
Florida (see also "The realm of the Dark Lord"
is very dark gray...should really be black when one considers a recent study that showed easily HALF of all homes in Jacksonville are UPSIDE DOWN on their mortgages.
I bought mine cheap 21 years ago and paid it off in 10 years, so with interest, I only paid $63K for it.
Houses identical to mine are selling for $50 effing grand, when BGW (Before George Bush) I could have sold it for $200K easily.
Bush cracked the planet with his "Start Nan Elem, Den attack Da Sand Jockeys" plan to boost the economy by starting 2 or 3 good wars.
And still Retardlikans cling to the theory that "He wasn't all that bad"
