Busting stereotypes

You’ve heard it before, the one about how the poor are lazy, how they’d rather live on welfare, how we’ve encouraged a culture of dependency. That’s the stereotype and, as a report issued today by the Poverty Research Institute shows, it is rather far from the reality.

The report found that one in five New Jersey families suffers from what it calls “income adequacy,” meaning they fail to earn enough to cover normal expenses for the region in which they live.

Two of the key myth-busters in the report are that:

• 85 percent of families living below the sufficiency level have at least one breadwinner
• one in eight families that have one member working full-time and year-round are living below the sufficiency level

The report goes into significant detail, outlining how the sufficiency level is calculated and what the levels are by county, as well as offering policy prescriptions. It is worth reading — and heeding.

Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet