Where are the poor?

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has new information about the working poor I find really interesting. The image that comes to mind when we hear the word 'poor' is of the inner-city poor - people, often African-American or Hispanic, who subsist on wages from low-paying jobs or barely get by on Aid to Families With Dependent Children. Those of us old enough to remember the television sitcom, "Good Times," probably envision the Evans family. (On which, by the way, Janet Jackson co-starred before she even had photo-worthy breasts.) Father James and mother Florida worked full-time jobs, but were never able to move out of low-income housing. But, people like the Evans are not alone at the bottom of the barrel economically.

The words "working poor" conjure up images of industrious, if unlucky, families, struggling to make ends meet in urban settings.

The reality in Washington state is a little different, with a greater percentage of rural tax filers qualifying as working but poor than their counterparts in big cities, according to a study by The Brookings Institution.

The report found that 15 percent of all tax filers in rural Washington areas claimed the Earned Income Tax Credit, a break designed to help lift the working poor out of poverty. In contrast, only 9 percent of taxpayers in the state's major cities took advantage of the break.

Those data place Washington among states where wealth and jobs are concentrated in large metropolitan areas, while the highest levels of those employed but stuck in poverty are found in the country, the report said.

Though the national data shows less of a bifurcation, the rural demographic is well-represented among the working poor in other states, as well.

Both in Washington and nationwide, though, the numbers of working poor rose in recent years, as the U.S. economy struggled to create jobs and rebound from recession. From 2000 to 2002, the number of U.S. families claiming the earned income tax credit rose 8 percent, according to the Brookings study. In Washington, the number of families rose 8.6 percent.

The worst of rural poverty is in the South, which has a long tradition of barely sustaining some of its citizenry, the International Herald Tribune reports.

Families in the rural South are more likely to earn low incomes than families in any other part of the nation, says a study released Tuesday by the Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy.

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Article Author: Mac Diva

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