Higher Ground: New Hope for the Working Poor and Their Children

Notes

Notes CHAPTER 1 1. Riemer (1988). 2. All of the names of New Hope participants used in the book are pseudonyms . Other information about families is changed occasionally so as to represent their overall situation but not the exact details of it. 3. Unless noted otherwise, all dollar figures in this book are expressed in 2005 dollars. The poverty line is adjusted only for inflation from one year to the next; therefore, when expressed in 2005 dollars, the poverty line for a family of three in both 1994 and 2005 has remained constant at $15,800. For details on poverty thresholds, see the historical poverty tables at the U.S. Bureau of the Census: http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/histpov/hst pov3.html. 4. We calculated these and other national data from the 2004 and 1994 Current Population Surveys. We are most grateful to Galo Falchettore of the Russell Sage Foundation for his assistance. Adult data apply to individuals between the ages of eighteen and fifty-four. We use the official definition of poverty and define working-poor adults as those who report working thirty or more “usual” weekly hours in the work weeks of the previous calendar year and who live in a family with total income below the poverty line. Child data apply to individuals younger than eighteen. We define a child as living in a working-poor family if family income is below the poverty line and either the head of the family or the spouse of the head of the family reports thirty or more usual weekly hours in the work weeks of the previous calendar year. 5. Blank and Schmidt (2001). 6. Rebecca Blank (1997, chapter 2) provides a good summary of these trends. 7. From 1980 to 1995, unemployment rates for low-skilled people hovered around 15 percent; rates were approximately 20 percent for African Americans and slightly less for Latinos (Blank 1997, chapter 2). 8. See Blank (1997, chapter 2) for a discussion of wages in the early 1990s. Even in 2005, women working full time were earning about $80 for every $100 earned by a white man; black and Hispanic women earned $68 and $55, respectively. The 2005 data apply to full-time workers between the ages NOTES of twenty-five and fifty-four and are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, available online at http://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.t02.htm. 9. In 1993, 57.7 percent of households headed by black females with children had incomes below the poverty threshold. The figure for households headed by Hispanic females was 51.6 percent. See http://www.census. gov/hhes/www/poverty/histpov/hstpov4.html for more information. 10. John Gurda (1999, 386–87) documents historical trends in Milwaukee’s population . Hmong, Laotian, and Vietnamese refugees came to Milwaukee as well during the 1980s and early 1990s, sponsored by church groups. Their numbers tripled to approximately 12,000 from 1980 to 1990, and some entered the New Hope lottery as well. 11. Katz (2001); Chase-Lansdale and Vinovskis (1995). 12. Gilens (1999); Strauss (2002). Most Americans also supported assistance for those who worked, who “did something,” and wanted their government to do more to help the poor (Gilens 1999). 13. Ellwood (1988); Edin and Lein (1997). 14. Quadagno (1996). 15. An adviser to Clinton, David Ellwood popularized the phrase “If you work, you shouldn’t be poor” following the publication of his 1988 book Poor Support. 16. In 2005 dollars, the $1,384 translates to $1,953. 17. Lykens and Jargowsky (2002); Fuller et al. (2002). 18. Jason DeParle (2004, 3–4) credits the phrase to Bruce Reed, a speechwriter, who coined the phrase for Clinton in a speech Clinton gave in October 1991 during the presidential campaign. 19. See Joel Handler (1995), Ron Haskins (2001), and DeParle (2004) for political histories of welfare reform and Mark Greenberg et al. (2002) for a summary of changes in the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), which contains fundamental restructuring of the federal welfare system. 20. Fuller et al. (2002). 21. The data are from our tabulations using the 2004 Current Population Survey . The overall population increased between 1994 and 2004. Therefore, although the number of working poor remained roughly constant, their population share declined slightly. 22. Mead (2004). 23. Mead (2004). 24. Nationally, about 40 percent of low-income workers are employed during nonstandard hours—that is, evenings and weekends. The most frequent nonday occupations are...