John Musca Policy makers in the United States have adopted the view that work is the solution to poverty, and the government's role is to promote employment rather than provide income support for poor families. For many families, however, work may not be enough to ensure a decent standard of living.

This report estimates the number of families who are not making ends meet. We examine the cost of living in every U.S. community and determine basic family budgets for various family types in each one. In all, over 400 separate basic family budgets for six family types are generated. We then count the number of working families in each state whose incomes fall below these basic budgets. Next we examine the hardships these families experience. Finally, we explore how the U.S. can create a social safety net that recognizes that work is not always enough to help families meet their basic needs.

John Musca

The federal poverty line is traditionally used to measure whether families have incomes too low to enable them to meet basic needs. Yet most researchers now agree that a "poverty line" income is not sufficient to support most working families. "Basic family budgets," individualized for communities nationwide and for type of family, offer a realistic measure of how much income it takes for a safe and decent standard of living. In this report we focus on a subset of families: those with one or two adults and one to three children under 12. Among these kinds of families, we find:

• basic family budgets for a two-parent, two-child family range from $27,005 a year to $52,114, depending on the community. The national median is $33,511, roughly twice the poverty line of $17,463 for a family that size;
• nationally, 29% of families with one to three children under 12 fell below basic family budget levels for their communities in the late 1990s;
• over two-and-a-half-times as many families fall below family budget levels as fall below the official poverty line. John Musca.