Brookings Institution: Ron Haskins- 'Family Poverty a Long-Term Trend'

Source:Brookings Institution- Fellow Ron Haskins.

"Ron Haskins: Since 2000, we've been on a rugged road. More and more families, especially those headed by single mothers have slipped into poverty; and it appears that this will be a  long term trend. More:Brookings Institution." 

From the Brookings Institution

The Great Recession only highlights poverty in America and how big a problem it is, because when the economy tanks it makes it even harder for people in poverty to get out of poverty and find a job that lifts them out of poverty even if they've improved themselves and obtain the skills that they need to get a good job because employers obviously don't hire as much when they have less revenue to spend and less customers. 

What a great recession and high poverty means for as a country is we have to get the economy going again with solid economic growth of 4-5% consistent economic growth of 4-5%. And we need job growth of around and we need around 200K jobs a month for several months. We just aren't doing that right now, we are currently growing at around 1.0% in the economy right now and didn't create one single job net in August. So we need to get the economy going again while we are still helping low-income, low-skilled people move out of poverty by empowering them to get themselves out of poverty. 

To move people out of poverty, gets to education and job training, as well as temporary financial assistance, so when the economy gets going again people in poverty will have the skills and education that they'll need to benefit from the economic expansion. And there are several ways that we can put people in poverty back to work and have plenty of jobs available. 

And there are things that we can do to prevent educated, unemployed workers from falling into poverty by reforming our Unemployment Insurance system. And there are also things that we can do to prevent people living in Public Housing from becoming homeless which is the worst aspect of poverty. 

But we have to do certain things to move people out of poverty. We have crumbling infrastructure that needs to be repaired as well as built to avoid more disasters in the future. And we can reform our Unemployment Insurance system to retrain unemployed workers, so they don't stay unemployed for long periods of times. And get additional job skills as well as keep their current job skills in check and don't become out of place. And put our people in Public Housing to work and get them more skills so they can get their own place to live. And not have to worry about being evicted and becoming homeless. 

This country needs a national energy policy that gets us off of foreign oil by investing in our own natural resources, including oil and gas, nuclear, solar, wind electricity, and others. We have all of these things and we are not using them as much as we should. 

A national infrastructure policy that rebuilds and expands our crumbling infrastructure like with a National Infrastructure Bank. As well as continue helping our people on public assistance and retrain our unemployed workers, so they and other can benefit from all of these jobs that would be created. 

Sitting around and doing nothing as a country and remaining gridlocked, just makes these issues worst.