If it shocks you that in Jacksonville, Illinois, almost 50 percent of the children in public school come from low income families, it will not console you when you hear that poverty rates are similar for the state of Illinois and the United States as a whole.
To get the facts, you should read the 2008 Report on Poverty in Illinois produced by the Mid-America Institute on Poverty under the auspices of the Heartland Alliance for Human Needs and Human Rights. Since 2000, the Institute has published current poverty data, trends affecting the state’s economic health, and potential strategies to reduce poverty in Illinois.
The Report categorizes 1.5 million, or 12 percent, of Illinois’ 12.8 million inhabitants as poor. Among the 300 million Americans altogether, 39 million, or 13 percent, rank below the official poverty line. In 1905, poverty in Morgan County, Illinois, stood at 13.8 percent, compared to a low of 5 percent in suburban Chicago’s Du Page County and a high of 33.9 percent in Alexander County (capital: Cairo) at the state’s southern tip.
543,000 of Illinois’ children and 13 million of the nation’s children live in poverty. Worse yet, since 1999 the child poverty rate in Illinois has grown by 19.6 percent. In 2006, 6.8 percent of the state’s poverty-stricken children lived in married-couple families, 24. 3 percent in single-father families, and 43.9 percent in single-mother families.
Women who are heads of households with children are most vulnerable to poverty. According to the 2008 Report, 403,756 Illinois households with children are headed by women, of which 24.3 percent, or 149,460, endure a poverty rate 2.6 times as high as the state’s overall family poverty rate.
The 2008 Report points out that many female-headed households begin with a divorce. In Illinois, over half a million adult women are divorced, of which 19.3 percent live in poverty. On average, median household income for divorced households with children declines 40 percent during the 5 years following divorce. In Illinois, only 31 percent of female-headed families received child support in 2004.
The increase in Illinois’ child poverty is at least partially due to the loss of parental purchasing power. From 2001 to 2007, average weekly wages fell in 7 of 11 job sectors. After adjusting for inflation, real weekly wages declined by: $32 for people working in the business and services sector. From 2001 to 2005, median household incomes dropped in 70 of Illinois’ 102 counties, with the statewide median income declining $1,547.20.
Sliding into poverty often begins with the parents’ inability to get an adequately income-producing job, purchase enough food, rent sufficient quarters, and buy health insurance. The state can only help if it is has the revenues to pay for the needed welfare services.
So far, however, Illinois’ legislature and governor have failed to fix the state budget’s structural deficit. The 2008 Report asserts that “Illinois’ system of generating revenue is antiquated, not taxing the growing parts of our economy. Illinois faces a revenue shortfall year after year while the cost of current services significantly exceeds revenue.” Consequently, “Families and communities go without the supports that can make a difference in whether or not they are able to get by, leave alone get ahead.”
Far from predicting a decline in Illinois’ poverty rate soon, the 2008 Report sees an additional 2,004,651, or 16 percent, of the state’s population at risk of falling into poverty. Nationwide the outlook is not better.
The more people impoverish, the more they lose their economic freedom to get the housing, the education, the health care, and the mobility to improve their lot. In short, their freedom is not threatened by enemies 8,000 miles away in the Middle East, but right here at home by their own and society’s inability to overcome the scourge of poverty.