- Working, but needing public assistance anyway, By Patricia Cohen, April 12, 2015, New York Times: “A home health care worker in Durham, N.C.; a McDonald’s cashier in Chicago; a bank teller in New York; an adjunct professor in Maywood, Ill. They are all evidence of an improving economy, because they are working and not among the steadily declining ranks of the unemployed. Yet these same people also are on public assistance — relying on food stamps, Medicaid or other stretches of the safety net to help cover basic expenses when their paychecks come up short. And they are not alone. Nearly three-quarters of the people helped by programs geared to the poor are members of a family headed by a worker, according to a new study by the Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California. As a result, taxpayers are providing not only support to the poor but also, in effect, a huge subsidy for employers of low-wage workers, from giants like McDonald’s and Walmart to mom-and-pop businesses…”
- Get a job? Most welfare recipients already have one, By Eric Morath, April 13, 2015, Wall Street Journal: “It’s poor-paying jobs, not unemployment, that strains the welfare system. That’s one key finding from a study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, that showed the majority of households receiving government assistance are headed by a working adult. The study found that 56% of federal and state dollars spent between 2009 and 2011 on welfare programs — including Medicaid, food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit— flowed to working families and individuals with jobs. In some industries, about half the workforce relies on welfare…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty