Poverty

According to newly released data on food insecurity, a full 14.9% of American households did not have access to enough food for an active, healthy life at some point during 2011. This finding comes from the U.S. Department of Agriculture,which puts out an annual report every September that calculates the prevalence of food insecurity, identifies the demographic characteristics and life circumstances of food insecure households, and analyzes food expenditures and participation in nutrition assistance programs.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include the declining middle class, housing, the perils of lending, and connections between health and wealth.

A series of recent articles from the St. Louis Dispatch has been documenting a disturbing trend in Missouri: the return of the debtors’ prison. Debtors’ prisons are technically illegal in all states, and largely regarded as a relic of the past. Still, Missouri and other states are increasingly jailing people for failure to pay private debts by relying on a technicality that permits incarceration when the debtor misses a court date. The Dispatch’s most recent installment focuses on the role of payday lenders in enforcing debts through the courts, resulting in additional fees and deep humiliation for customers who end up spending time behind bars. Payday lenders, however, are not alone in enforcing such serious penalties for an inability to repay a debt; moreover, this trend can be understood as but one facet of the larger criminalization of poverty.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include poverty in politics, financial services, and asset poverty.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include financial capability, measuring poverty, and welfare.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include gaps in wealth and income, welfare, and savings.

Having a bank account is foundational to building financial security. Unfortunately, the lower your income, the more likely you are to be financially insecure and the less likely you are to have a bank account. According to the FDIC, about 20 percent of households earning less than $30,000 are unbanked.

Last week, the YouthSave consortium held a timely event to discuss new research exploring the financial lives of youth. Currently, a third of the world’s population is under the age of 19, and young people are three times more likely to be unemployed than adults. The panelists attempted to shed light on how financial institutions could alleviate the pressures of this youth bulge and help create meaningful financial products and economic opportunities. In the event’s closing remarks, Alexia Latortue, Deputy CEO of CGAP, offered a realistic and on-point breakdown of the opportunities and challenges at hand.

Peter Edelman, professor of law at Georgetown University and author of the new book So Rich, So Poor, has an opinion piece in Sunday's New York Times looking at the persistence of poverty in the U.S. Edelman does what so many have failed to do, which is to outline the notable success of government action, saying,

"[W]e have done a lot that works. From Social Security to food stamps to the earned-income tax credit and on and on, we have enacted programs that now keep 40 million people out of poverty. Poverty would be nearly double what it is now without these measures..."

And yet, poverty remains widespread. Edelman identifies four key reasons why:

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include poverty, consumer protection, and banking services.