Cure For Poverty: Hold A Full-Time, Year-Round Job

Just 2.7 percent of those who do in Michigan fall below the poverty line

By Tom Gantert | September 20, 2018

Fewer than 3 out of 100 people in Michigan who work year-round full-time jobs live in poverty.

Federal guidelines placed Michigan’s 2017 poverty rate threshold at $12,060 a year for a single person. For a household of three persons, the threshold was $20,400.

Michigan’s minimum wage law requires employers to pay a wage of at least $9.25 an hour. At that rate, a person who works 40 hours a week all year round would earn $19,240.

There were 3,083,021 people in Michigan who worked year-round full-time jobs in 2017. Some 83,000 of them earned incomes that fell below the federal poverty line, according to the American Community Survey, released by the U.S. Census Bureau. That translates into just under 2.7 percent of all year-round full-time Michigan workers having poverty-level incomes.

"A full-time job is enough to pull people out of poverty most of the time,” said James Hohman, director of fiscal policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

The share of Michigan residents of all ages living below the poverty line has declined for seven consecutive years. It was 17.5 percent of the state population in 2011, dropping to 14.2 percent in 2017, which is the lowest rate since 2007, according to the Census Bureau.

Roughly 1 million Michigan residents were over the age of 16 and lived in a household with an income below the poverty line. Within that group were 589,000 people who did not work.

“Of the 589,000 Michigan individuals age 16 and over and in poverty that the U.S. Census Bureau reports as having not worked during the year, keep in mind that this number includes those who are elderly, those who are disabled, and those age 16-18 who are still in high school — people not in the labor force and who cannot be reasonably expected to work,” said Peter Ruark, policy analyst with the Michigan League for Public Policy.

Ruark continued, “A better way to measure poverty and unemployment is to use the Census numbers for the civilian labor force age 16 and over and in poverty, of whom 75 percent were employed during the year and 25 percent were unemployed.”

Michigan Capitol Confidential is the news source produced by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Michigan Capitol Confidential reports with a free-market news perspective.

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Want Faster Internet? What Rural Communities Should Explore

Government shouldn't be in business of providing internet

By Jarrett Skorup | September 19, 2018

Lyndon Township is a rural community of fewer than 3,000 people in Washtenaw County. Its municipal budget is around $500,000. Residents went to the polls last year and approved borrowing $7 million to build a new high-speed internet connection.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the completion date of the project has been delayed.

This is the latest of many projects across Michigan where cities use taxpayer dollars to get in the game of providing internet services for residents (there’s also a substantial group working on a similar proposal just outside Ann Arbor). Unfortunately, even with federal stimulus dollars backing them, the vast majority of public broadband projects have failed – resulting in huge losses to taxpayers and minimal benefits for the public.

While internet usage has been getting more widespread, faster and cheaper, many rural communities are frustrated by a lack of access. The Mercatus Center has three recommendations for broadband deployment: 1) Rely on private industry, which is expanding access at no cost or risk to taxpayers. 2) Make broadband deployment cheaper and faster by streamlining state and local rules; Michigan has considered some bills to do so. 3) Create vouchers for rural and senior citizens. This encourages private investment more efficiently than the government owning and operating a network.

All three of these options would be preferable to local governments trying their hand at competing with the likes of Comcast, Charter, Google Fiber and others.