The most effective means of poverty include funding a strong public education system from preschool through college, increasing the minimum wage, providing universal healthcare and offering many more housing assistance vouchers and mandating some forms of rent control. To lift individuals out of poverty, we need many of those tools, Read more…
As communities and policymakers, we need to work together to transform all the influences to the communities well-being. It’s not just giving a job and housing, its changing the environment and opportunities for community members. Accessible transportation, jobs in local neighborhoods not where you have to take four different buses Read more…
Each year, the Los Angeles County Business Federation, BizFed, a grassroots alliance of 180 business organizations representing 400,000 employers that employ 3.5 million Angelenos, conducts its “Pulse Poll,” meant to gauge the temperature of the business community and the issues affecting the industry. In the 2019 poll, BizFed members identified Read more…
People have struggled with how best to deal with poverty since the earliest societies, but the answer is apparent if we merely look to history. From the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution to modern times, poverty has been most radically and rapidly alleviated whenever people are free to work in Read more…
A person’s most direct way out of poverty is to have a job that pays a living wage. Acquiring the skills and overcoming structural barriers for some will take time. Therefore policy must focus on these pathways. In the short run, a more robust Earned Income Tax Credit would reduce Read more…
Education is critical to helping people avoid poverty. Not everyone needs a college degree to get a good job, but when they can’t read proficiently or do simple math, they are more likely to be impoverished, and when their children grow up in poverty, those children are more likely to Read more…
One of the best ways to keep people out of poverty is to position them so they have every opportunity to succeed and achieve financial security and family stability. Folks need employment opportunities, housing opportunities and opportunities to better themselves by getting an education. But more than eight million Californians Read more…
The first thing we need is a big shift in mindset: we tend to think of poverty as an unfortunate result of our economy instead of understanding the disequalizing forces that have caused California to become the fourth most unequal state in the union. Poverty is not so much a Read more…
As the 2019 Nobel prize winning economists of the Poverty Action Lab found, job creation and access to employment are key factors in keeping low-income people out of poverty. Data from the Census Bureau showed the official poverty rate in the U.S. dropped to 11.8% in 2018, the lowest since Read more…
Creating a regulatory, tax, and governmental environment that welcomes job-creation in California is the best way to keep Californians out of poverty. Yet, in large part responsive to understandably compassionate instincts, our government tends to go directly to wealth transfers, without realizing the importance of wealth creation.Without wealth creation in Read more…
Studies show that education is key–staying in school, graduating from high school, going on to community college and university–each level of academic achievement ensures opportunities for higher earnings and valuable skills for employment.
Poverty, like many societal ills, is a multifaceted issue. It does not result from one simple cause, which means there is no one simple solution. We also know that an individual or family typically does not find themselves living in poverty overnight and there are many factors that can keep Read more…
The most effective means of keeping people out of poverty begins with providing people with quality, government funded education pre school to colleges that prepares them for the workforce and opens up opportunities to economic opportunity. Prosperity comes from good paying jobs, supports for entrepreneurs and a robust safety net Read more…
Job opportunities will lift and keep people out of poverty. Education and training can help people develop and maintain skills to get the jobs they want and to achieve income growth and advancement. A steadily improving economy and a relatively competitive labor market will provide many different opportunities, enabling people Read more…
1) A cross-sectoral approach that looks at the nexus and connections between health care, including preventative care, housing, education, wage gaps and access to public transportation. 2) More public-private partnerships and a greater focus on regional disparities that addresses the unfair and inequitable distribution and access to resources in hard Read more…
High-paying blue collar work is the key. Right now we are producing some very high paid work (mostly in the Bay Area) but 80 percent of jobs pay below medium and half of those pay under $40,000. Those are essentially working poverty levels. There also needs to be more emphasis Read more…
Liberate markets. Is it old news now that democratic capitalism has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty?
Providing a healthy, safe home at a price affordable to very low and extremely low income households. If families pay no more than 30% of their income for rent or mortgage, they have the majority of their income available for healthy food, health care, transportation and even a modest savings Read more…