Social service orgs warn of harsh economic times
Missouri's median income has dropped $5,432 since 2001.
Published Aug. 29, 2008
As gas prices rise to the highest they've been in years, families all over Missouri are struggling to make ends meet.
Prices are up 93.6 cents a gallon from last year, according to a recent report by the Energy Information Association.
Because of the increasing price of oil, the cost of everything from child care to corn has increased.
The price of eggs is up 40 percent from a year ago, and household staples, like milk, saw a price increase of 26 percent, according to a report in the Boston Globe.
The rising cost of these staples is not taken into account by the current federal poverty measure. That statistic identifies the amount of household income one can attain as well as how much income is necessary to cover basic necessities.
Colleen Heflin, professor at the Truman School of Public Affairs, criticized the system in an MU news release.
"The current federal poverty measure is not designed to capture this trend (of rising prices)," Heflin said in a news release. "Currently, there is no nationally representative annual measure to show whether people are able to meet the cost of the basic necessities required to participate fully in society."
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of people living below the poverty line in Missouri has increased to 742,000 residents from 659,000 in 2006.
Missouri's median income has dropped $5,432 since 2001, second only to West Virginia. Nationally, however, household incomes are up for the third year in a row, and the poverty level has not wavered from 2006.
"It is very discouraging that Missouri actually lost ground last year in the key areas of poverty, health coverage and family income," said Amy Blouin, executive director of the Missouri Budget Project, in a news release. "This leaves Missouri families ill-prepared to weather the tough economic times we are now facing."
Bob Quinn, executive director of the Missouri Association for Social Welfare, said these challenges are made even more difficult because working families are actually bringing home less income now than they were in 2001.
According to the Missouri Economic Research and Information Center, per capita
personal income in Missouri increased 4.9 percent in 2007 to $34,389.
According to the Missouri Budget Project, at least 19,100 jobs have been lost since January of this year and 171,541 Missourians were unemployed as of July 2008.
"If people cannot purchase things, they many times go without," Blouin said. "People are hungry, people are struggling to make it, and we can do better than this."
If trends continue, the Missouri Budget Project predicts that the number of people in poverty could increase. With job loss and decreased income level comes a potential loss of health coverage, he said, which would equate an increased need for the state to provide services to its low-income residents.
In attempts to give a prescription for Missouri's latest ailment, Blouin and Quinn offered this advice in a news release: "Missouri's new governor and state legislature must work across party lines next year to ensure critical state services are available to our state's residents during these tough economic times."
