June 29, 2000 (The Editor’s Desk is updated each business day.)
Assistance recipients spend bigger share on basics
Families receiving
public assistance differ from other families in the way they spend.
Expenditures on basic needs accounted for a bigger share of their spending
in 1998.
[Chart data—TXT]
Furthermore, such spending varies according to the number of public
assistance programs a family participates in. Housing, for example,
accounted for about 31 percent of the spending of families who were not
receiving public assistance and about 38 percent of the spending of
families receiving benefits from four or five programs.
The pattern was even stronger in food expenditures. The food budget
share increases with every additional assistance program: 17 percent for
families participating in one program, 20 percent if in two programs, 24
percent if three, and 26 percent among families receiving four or five
types of assistance. Families that did not receive public assistance
allocated a little less than 14 percent of their annual expenditures to
food.
These data are a product of the BLS Consumer
Expenditure Survey program. The
public assistance programs included in the analysis were supplementary
security income, welfare, medicaid, food stamps, housing subsidies, and
public housing. Find more information in "Spending patterns of
public-assisted families," by Lucilla Tan, Monthly Labor Review,
May 2000.
Of interest
Spotlight on Statistics: National Hispanic Heritage Month
In this Spotlight, we take a look at the Hispanic labor force—including labor force participation, employment and unemployment, educational attainment, geographic location, country of birth, earnings, consumer expenditures, time use, workplace injuries, and employment projections.
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Read more »