Are we in crisis mode yet?
According to the Fiscal Policy Institute, one-third of New Yorkers do not make enough money to support their very basic needs. That’s 5.7 million people.
The report is a depressing answer to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service federal poverty index, which does not take the cost-of-living differences into account, said Trudy Renwick of the Fiscal Policy Institute in a Poughkeepsie Journal story.
For example, the current federal poverty line for a family of four is $21,200 a year. But in New York, the institute concludes, itis just above $41,000 in rural areas and is $60,780 on Long Island.
The report was compiled for Gov. David Paterson’s economic security task force.
From the story:
The report, from a labor-backed think tank, said that for 5.7 million New Yorkers, families face a “hardship gap”: at least one person has a job, but there aren’t enough earnings to pay for basic family expenses, which include food, rent, utilities, health insurance, transportation and child care.
The proportion of New York families who don’t make enough to buy these services, 30 percent, is well above the national median of 22 percent and the highest of any state in the Northeast, according to the report from the Fiscal Policy Institute.
Trudy Renwick, an economist with the institute, said “anemic wage levels at the low end of the job spectrum” are to blame.
She said state programs like subsidized health care and earned-income tax credits are helping, but “more needs to be done.”
[...] E. Powderly II In between heated discussions on how the state government can step in to save the 5.7 million New Yorkers drowning in a sea of rising energy and necessity costs, the state Senate found time to approve an even more [...]