by Sara Kimberlin and Jill Duerr Berrick, San Jose Mercury News
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Cuts to the food stamp program took effect this week. A typical low-income, three-person family will have about $30 less to spend on food every month from now on. Milk, eggs, and bread. That’s what $30 will buy in a typical month. And that’s what children and families may do without as they stretch meager public benefits just a bit farther.
These cuts are one more indicator of a country that’s rewritten the narrative on the positive attributes of government benefits for the poor. In fact, congressional debates that assault programs for low-income and working-class families might lead the average American to believe that government assistance is a boondoggle — a waste of taxpayer money that does more harm than good.
But research coming out of UC Berkeley paints another picture that congressional representatives and all Americans should heed: Government programs substantially reduce chronic poverty in the United States.
The poverty rate in California remains stubbornly fixed at about 16 percent. More troubling, children are especially likely to live in poverty. In our fine state, almost one in four children lives at or below the poverty line.
But these numbers reveal only part of the story. They tell us how many are poor today, but they say nothing about how long Americans experienced poverty. Was it a year? Three years? Longer still? Decades of research show that the outcomes associated with long-term poverty are grave. Transient, or short-term poverty, is bad; long-term, or chronic, poverty is much worse. Among children in particular, those who spend many years in poverty fare worse on a variety of measures of health, development, education and well-being. The youngest children living in the deepest poverty for the longest periods of time have a tough time beating the odds stacked against them.
Using the newly developed federal Supplemental Poverty Measure with a nationally representative data set to examine poverty over an 11-year period, a Berkeley study examined rates of chronic versus transient poverty. Chronic poverty was defined as poor for more than half of the years examined. Transient poverty was defined as poor in at least one year but not more than half the years.
Chronic poverty was relatively uncommon, affecting only 2 percent, or 1 in 50 individuals. Transient poverty, however, was fairly typical, affecting almost 1 in 5, or nearly 20 percent of the population.
This news is important for at least two reasons:
First, the number of people living in chronic poverty is relatively low. That means we can do something about this pressing social problem. With determined effort, we could eradicate chronic poverty in the U.S. today.
Second, according to findings from the Berkeley study, government benefits such as food stamps, the Earned Income Tax Credit and Social Security have a substantial impact on persistent poverty. Absent government benefits, the chronic poverty rate would be more than five times higher, at 10.8 percent. Said differently, nearly 1 in 9 Americans would experience long-term poverty if it were not for the essential supports government benefits provide. That level of chronic poverty would have dramatic implications for our country’s social functioning and economic potential.
Publicly funded programs provide a lifeline to low-income families, protecting many from chronic poverty and its serious impact on health and well-being. Over the short term and long term, milk, eggs and bread make a real difference in the lives of vulnerable children and their parents.
Sara Kimberlin is a recent graduate of the Ph.D. program in social welfare at UC Berkeley, where Jill Duerr Berrick is the Zellerbach Family Foundation Chair in Social Welfare. They wrote this for this newspaper.
