State budget could cost thousands child-care subsidies, By Emma Baccellieri, July 11, 2014, Charlotte Observer: “Hundreds of Charlotte children – and thousands across the state – could lose their after-school care when the state budget is approved. In an attempt to give higher priority to North Carolina’s youngest and poorest children, both the House and the Senate budgets include changes to how the state determines eligibility for child care subsidies. But while the proposed system would open up space for disadvantaged children under the age of 5, it would remove funding for nearly 12,000 school-age children – leaving many families in a difficult position…”
Day: July 16, 2014
Concentrated Poverty – Oregon
Oregon’s huge increase in people living in high-poverty areas one of nation’s most extreme, study finds, By Betsy Hammond, July 16, 2014, The Oregonian: “Oregon experienced one of the nation’s most severe increases in people living in areas of concentrated poverty during the first decade of this century, according to a new Census Bureau study of living situations in 2000 and 2010. It was one of just four states — all in the South except Oregon — where the share of people living in census tracts with a high share of impoverished residents shot up more than 15 percentage points over that period…”
Part-Time Work
- A part-timer boom, or blip? By Robert Samuelson, July 16, 2014, Washington Post: “There may be a dark lining to the sunny June employment report, which recorded an increase of 288,000 payroll jobs for the month. Most — or all — of the increase may have been part-time jobs. If that’s a trend, it could signal a weaker economy. It could also vindicate critics of the Affordable Care Act (the ACA or Obamacare). They have argued that the added costs of providing health insurance for full-time workers would cause many firms to emphasize part-time employment. Is it a trend? Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Mortimer Zuckerman — real estate developer and editor in chief of U.S. News & World Report — says yes. Some data seem convincing. In June, part-time jobs (defined as less than 35 hours a week) increased by 1,115,000, reports the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS); full-time jobs fell by 708,000. . .”
- Yes, some people are working part-time. No, that’s not a disaster for the recovery. By Jared Bernstein, July 18, 2014, Washington Post: “By many indicators, the recent job market is clearly improving. It still has a long way to go, but the pace of employment growth is up and unemployment has fallen sharply in recent months. Importantly, the recent decline in the jobless rate has been for the right reason: people getting jobs as opposed to people leaving the labor market (since only jobseekers are counted as unemployed, if they give up the job search, the unemployment rate is artificially lowered). Still, those in the business of disparaging the ‘Obama recovery’ latched onto the spike in part-time work in the last jobs report as an indicator that the silver lining has a dark cloud around it. Based on the rise in part-time jobs in June, a Wall Street Journal opinion piece complained. . .”
- Part-Time Workers Deserve the Shift, Not the Shaft, By Megan McArdle, July 17, 2014, Bloomberg View: “The plight of low-wage retail workers has generated much talk in recent years. As I’ve written before, I don’t find problematic the existence of jobs that do not pay enough to support a family. Retail jobs have never paid well, because retail margins tend to be pretty slim. The problem is not that retail is a low-wage job, but that an increasing number of people can’t find any other sort of job. The natural response of many people is to say, well, these are the jobs we have now, so they should pay what factory jobs used to. Yet like the manufacturing jobs that went away, many of those low-wage retail jobs also face competition — from higher-productivity firms. . .”