Oregon Example: Postive Family Income Impacts of Mainstream Programs.

With the annual Oregon poverty conference coming up soon and my recent stories about SCHIP and the Healthy Kids Ballot measure, I thought it would be interesting to develop an example showing the impact of mainstream programs on family incomes and the variable share of costs paid for by those programs. The programs I chose for this example were health insurance, food stamps, rent assistance, and earned income tax credits.

Using a variety of data sources, I estimated the share of costs for these items paid for by the government, and the resulting family savings, for a working family with two adults and one child, with one adult working at 110% of the 2008 Oregon minimum wage.

The details are found in the PDF HERE. The summary is that these four support programs:

• Increased income by 56%, more than $10,000 a year.

• Moved the family from 104% of the poverty level to 162% of the poverty level.