Recent data, released by the U.S. Census Bureau, show poverty in Maine leveling off, statewide, from its peak in the years immediately after the recession.
But the poverty rate in some Maine counties continues to exceed state and national averages.
This story is the first in a series of stories of several women, all middle-aged, coping with the anxiety and difficult choices that come with simply not making enough money to live on.
But how is poverty actually measured? We begin our series of reports with a look at the official federal formula for measuring poverty. Some researchers say it's not accurately capturing the number of people living in economic distress in Maine.
This story begins back in 1963, when Mollie Orshansky, a research analyst at the Social Security Administration, was assigned a project by her superiors. Orshansky's bosses wanted her to do a paper on how poverty effects children. There was no official U.S. government measure of poverty at the time. So Orshansky used data — from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's low-income food program — to come up with one.
"It took the USDA food plan and multiplied it by three....because at the time food represented about a third of the family's budget," says Mary Beth Mattingly, Director of Research on Vulnerable Families at the University of New Hampshire's Carsey School of Public Policy.
Mattingly says the figure Orshansky came up with was the early basis of the income thresholds that eventually became the official statistical measure of poverty in the U.S. The Orshansky thresholds have been adjusted for inflation over the years and are still used by the U.S. Census Bureau to calculate its official poverty numbers. But Mattingly says those data have become an increasingly less reliable way of calculating just how many people in a given state are living in true economic distress.
"That measure is one that just compares pre-tax, cash income to a poverty threshold and a threshold that's based on a formula that was developed in the early 60s and is quite outdated," Orshansky says. "And it's a one size fits all threshold regardless of where in the nation you live. So the official threshold doesn't take into account geographical differences in the cost of living."
Or incomes.
"Our state's median income remains well below the national," says Ann Acheson, Research Associate at UMaine's Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center. She says while Maine's economy continues to slowly improve and unemployment falls to levels not seen since the days before the recession.
"Maine has lower wage rates for comparable incomes than is true in other states," Acheson says. "And Maine has a lot of part time and seasonal work, which also tends to depress household incomes."
And there are the thousands of people, many with only a high school diploma, who lost high paying jobs in paper mills in recent years, as the industry fell into decline. Glen Mills is Chief Economist at the Center for Workforce Research at the Maine Department of Labor.
"Somebody who was displaced from a production line...there's a good chance they're not going to find that kind of job again," Mills says.
Instead, Mills says many of theses workers have been forced to take lower skill, lower paying jobs. In 2008, as the recession was beginning to take hold, just over 12% of people in Maine were living below the poverty level, according to the census bureau. That number jumped to nearly 15% a few years ago...and has fallen only slightly since. UMaine's Ann Acheson says the loss of manufacturing jobs, along with the other forces that have depressed wages here, make the federal method used to come up with these poverty statistics an unreliable barometer of the number of people in Maine who are really struggling.
"There are an awful lot of people who are in a population of what we call 'the working poor' who have very low incomes, but it is above the poverty level," Acheson says. "But it's really just barely enough to get by."
Acheson says two statistics, in particular, can help provide a more well rounded picture of the number of people in Maine who are struggling to get by. The Earned Income Tax Credit, introduced during the Clinton Administration, gives a tax break to extremely low income people who are working. Between 8 to 10% of Maine's population qualifies for the credit. And there's the poverty measure used to determine how many kids in a given public school qualify for free lunch from the federal government. In Maine, nearly 40% of children in most counties qualify for so called free and reduced lunch.