Full Citation
Title: One Third of A Nation: Strategies for Helping Working Families
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2016
ISBN:
ISSN:
DOI:
NSFID:
PMCID:
PMID:
Abstract: When Franklin Roosevelt delivered his second inaugural address on January 20 1936, he thanked the “men and women of good will” who had elected him in a landslide, and issued them a challenge. “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” he said. “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” All Americans aspire to join the middle class, but today many struggle to do so; 36 million workingage Americans find themselves stuck in Roosevelt’s impoverished “one-third.” To be sure, they are better off than in Roosevelt’s day, with new supports like the earned income tax credit, the child tax credit, housing vouchers, and Medicaid. In addition, the composition of this group has shifted from being disproportionately old to being disproportionately working-aged. The introduction and later expansion of Social Security and Medicare have greatly reduced poverty among the elderly. But among working-age adults and their children, progress has come more slowly. For whatever reason—low wages or lack of employment—these families are not achieving the American Dream. The group we analyze throughout this paper is simply the poorest one-third of all families in the U.S. with an able-bodied head between the ages of 25 and 54 (hereafter struggling families or households).1 This group is larger than the population in poverty (although 83 percent of them fall below 200 percent of the federal poverty line, or FPL). All of them (by definition) . . .
Url: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/one-third-of-a-nation.pdf
User Submitted?: No
Authors: Sawhill, Isabel; Rodrigue, Edward; Joo, Nathan
Publisher: The Brookings Institution
Data Collections: IPUMS CPS
Topics: Family and Marriage, Other, Poverty and Welfare
Countries: