Gilda Z. Jacobs

As a lifelong Metro Detroiter, it’s heart-breaking to see the latest poverty statistics for our already troubled region.

Among the country’s 50 largest cities, Detroit has the dubious distinction of having the largest share of children living in poverty or in low-income families.
Four out of every five kids in Detroit lived at less than 200 percent of poverty — the level many experts consider necessary to cover the most basic needs, according to KIDS COUNT.

Statewide, one in every four kids lives in poverty. Overall the poverty rate is nearly 17 percent with the rate for African Americans double that – nearly 34 percent.
As troubling as the poverty numbers are, they don’t show the full picture of families struggling to make ends meet. The Census Bureau considers a family of four to be living in poverty if its income is below $22,314, but most studies suggest families need at least twice that to pay their bills.

Today, one in nine workers in Michigan, and one out of 11 nationally, are unemployed. Nationally, 6 million workers –- that’s how many total people live in Wisconsin plus the Upper Peninsula –-  have been out of work for at least six months. These workers have spent their savings and many have exhausted their unemployment benefits.

Poverty and unemployment also have longer term consequences. Unemployed workers lose critical job skills. Poor children’s health and development suffers, and they do worse in school, threatening their ability to become productive workers as adults. Seniors in poverty can’t afford the health care they need to stay strong and independent. 

By 2018, our country will have 3 million fewer new workers with bachelor’s or associate’s degrees than it will need. That limits our capacity for sustained economic growth and harms us all.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We know how to help people through hard times and prepare for a stronger economic future. For example, the availability of public health insurance meant that while the number of people with private health insurance fell this year, the share of Americans who are uninsured did not grow.

President Obama’s jobs package is a step in the right direction to reduce the number of people falling out of the middle class and build a stable, strong economy. Attempts to reduce the deficit through cuts in health care or other essential services are bound to fail because they will reduce jobs, cripple economic activity, and shrink tax revenues.

Right now we face a triple threat. Rising poverty creates more demand for critical services, just when states and the federal government have cut services. Here in Michigan we have already cut education, public safety and safety net programs.  Now Congress is considering additional cuts, which is exactly the wrong choice.
We need our leaders to have the courage to make the right choices. 

A congressional  “supercommittee” is developing a plan to reduce our federal deficit. The surest way to reduce the deficit is to get people back to work and paying taxes. The “supercommittee” should develop a plan that creates jobs and continues unemployment insurance. It should ask millionaires and profit-rich corporations to pay their share in taxes and cut expensive contracts and other waste in our defense budget. 

Our country and our state cannot thrive when so many people are struggling.  We must act now.

– Gilda Z. Jacobs

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Categories: Blog: Factually Speaking, Census, Health Care, Human Services, Kids Count, Racial equity, State Budget, Tax Policy, Workforce Development | Tags: budget, caseload, Census, children, children and families, education, Health Care, health insurance, Kids Count, poverty, racial disparity, safety net, unemployment, vulnerable families