Making Ends Meet in Howard County
Executive Summary
The Policy Analysis Center engaged the Johns Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies to build on its previous work estimating the costs of achieving self-sufficiency in Howard County, Maryland. The self-sufficiency standard measures how much income is needed for a family of a certain composition in a given place to adequately meet their basic needs – without public or private assistance. Unlike the Federal Poverty Level (FPL), which is based mostly on a food budget and is the same for all areas within the continental United States, the self-sufficiency standard also takes into account costs of housing, childcare, transportation, healthcare and taxes and is specific to a place.
The self-sufficiency standard calculation for Howard County reveals that a household with one adult and two teenagers needs $47,437 to cover basic yearly expenses, yet for the same sized family the FPL is $18,310. For the purposes of this report, we define the “working poor individuals” in Howard County as individuals whose income falls between the FPL and the self-sufficiency standard for one adult in the County ($10,830 – $31,517). “Working poor households” are defined as households earning more than FPL for 2- or 3-person household and less than self-sufficiency wage for the household type.
The FPL is generally felt by analysts and practitioners to be unrealistic in the 21st century, but it is used as the basis for eligibility determinations for many federal work support programs. Work supports are government programs that seek to fill the gap between low wages and the cost of an individual or family’s basic living expenses. The first part of this report analyzes how well these work supports achieve their objectives in Howard County.
The analysts who prepared this report quantified the work support benefits for which individuals and families of the five types used in the Howard County, Maryland Self-sufficiency Indicators 2009 Report are eligible.
PLEASE NOTE: For the purpose of the calculations in this study, it is assumed that individuals and families receive all work supports for which they are eligible; unfortunately, due to programmatic funding constraints and lack of information, many individuals and families do not receive all available work supports.
