Four in 10 Americans sometimes face what economists call “material hardship,” struggling to pay for basic needs such as food and housing, according to a new study from the Urban Institute. Even middle-class families routinely struggle financially and are occasionally unable to pay their bills.
The finding is striking given the U.S. has experienced a decade of economic growth in the decade since the recession ended. The unemployment rate is at its lowest in half a century, and the stock market has enjoyed a decade-long bull run. But for many Americans, incomes haven’t kept up with the rising cost of necessities such as housing and health care, resulting in financial anxiety.
About 39 percent of Americans ages 18 to 65 experienced at least one type of material hardship last year, statistically unchanged from the 39.3 percent who suffered hardship in 2017, the nonpartisan think tank found. The study spans the first two years of the Trump administration, as well as the first year of the tax overhaul. Yet there was little progress easing the financial challenges experienced by U.S. adults last year, the Urban Institute said.
“The modest declines in hardship during the current favorable economic environment suggest further progress will require additional policies to raise and stabilize incomes, offset the cost of essential expenses and protect families against adverse financial shocks,” the study noted.
The think tank is revisiting the survey each year to measure changes in how American families are are faring financially. The study surveyed more than 7,500 adults about whether they had trouble paying for housing, utilities, food or health care.
Food and health care worries
The hardships experienced by U.S. families underscores that income is only one part of the equation, the Urban Institute said. “It is also important to consider the cost of major expenses such as housing, utilities, child care, transportation and health care” on household budgets, it noted.
Food insecurity and medical bills remain a sticking point for many families, with nearly 1 in 5 families saying they had experienced difficulty paying for food or medical care.
But the researchers found that even middle-class families are struggling with the bills. Almost 1 in 3 households that earn at least twice the federal poverty level — equivalent to annual income of $50,200 for a family of four — say they struggled with meeting basic needs. The bills that caused them the most trouble — medical and food costs, the study found. About 1 in 7 middle-class families said they struggled with medical bills or didn’t receive medical care because of the cost.
To be sure, low-income families — those earning less than twice the federal poverty level, or less than $50,100 for a family of four — are struggling most. About 60 percent of those surveyed said they struggled to pay their bills, with 53 percent reporting paying more than half their income on housing, considered a severe housing burden.
“These housing-cost burdens are likely to constrain low-income families’ ability to pay for housing and other essential expenses, such as food, medical care, transportation, and child care,” the authors noted.
Since this is CBS reporting this, I’m taking it as doublespeak for:
PREPARE TO STRUGGLE HARDER
Communism is very hungry, and hunger feeds it.
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There Must Be A Homestead
— William Gayley Simpson, excerpted from his 1978 book, “Which Way Western Man?”
THERE MUST be a homestead. And a homestead is more than a mere house located in the country. It must be at least a house that a man securely owns, and in connection with which he owns also a shop or land enough to make of him and his holding a significant unit of production. The homestead must provide the means by which a man and those who follow him, generation after generation, are able, without worry or hurry, to make sure of their living, primarily by producing and making for themselves the things that they need. Often there have been laws—very wise ones—by which it was made almost impossible for the ancestral holdings to be alienated.
The homestead thus became the citadel of a man’s life. Here he could hold off the pressures of the world. Here he had room to discover his own bent and to follow it, to try out his own ideas and to reap the fruit of acting upon them. Here he had room to become a person, not necessarily a great person, but a person, with a shape and direction and force of his own. Though another man be greater than he, even much greater (for thus it is among humans), yet by his homestead he was given the freedom, not perhaps to vote (which is generally but an infrequent and trivial, and commonly even an utterly empty, expression of freedom), but to be something in and of himself, to be a man, all year round, to be what he really was … with his life rooted somewhat thus, in the land, known wherever he went, and far beyond where he went, for the strength of his character.
The great body of the people of a society thus constituted are established on the land, in the open country, in villages and towns. Also, their economic and political life is decentralized. Everything except matters of the most general concern is decided locally, by the people whose interests are immediately involved in the decision to be made, and who know the situation firsthand. Only so can policies be shaped for the true good of the people. Only so, when the administrative units are small, is it possible to keep alive in the smaller individuals a healthy sense of their worth and importance, to keep them from being crushed into a feeling of insignificance and impotence under the sheer mass weight of numbers and size. …
I myself am fully aware that our much-vaunted modern industrialism has already all but destroyed the economic foundation of the home. It has cut its roots. There is almost no more reason for the existence of homes. People might as well live in flats and apartments, and ever increasingly they do. The decline of family solidarity has been paced by the growth of insurance companies, which have so largely taken its place. … If we continue in the direction in which we are now plunging headlong, the family must become but a fond memory, an empty name, a dead shell. Yes, I am realist enough to recognize all this. Indeed, I recognize more.
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