Earning $73,337 a year might sound like a decent income to support an adult and three children. But in Montgomery County, a new study finds, you could barely make ends meet.
In Howard County, $66,000 would put the same family on the rocks. In Baltimore, the family would need $51,377. In Garrett County in Western Maryland, it could get by with $36,588.
Those are the conclusions of "The Self-Sufficiency Standard for Maryland," a study released yesterday that claims to calculate the cost of living in one of the nation's wealthiest states.
Diana Pearce, a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, created the self-sufficiency standard several years ago. With Congress preparing to reauthorize the 1996 welfare reform law next year, the nonprofit Ford Foundation is paying for Pearce to come up with the standards in 35 states.
Advocacy groups are promoting Pearce's standard as a more realistic alternative to the federal poverty line, which a range of academics has criticized as outdated. But conservative critics point to the thousands of families surviving on incomes that studies like Pearce's call unsustainable.
Maryland is the 19th state where Pearce has conducted the study. She also has analyzed what it costs to live in New York City and in the area around Washington, D.C.
Under her "self-sufficiency standard," more Marylanders would be considered poor.
By the study's definition, for example, at least 13 percent of families living in Baltimore County cannot survive without help from friends or relatives, private charities or government subsidies. Just 5 percent of county families fall below the federal poverty level, according to a U.S. Census survey last year.
The census estimated that 25,023 families in the county earned less than $25,000 a year. Pearce's study concluded that an adult and a teen-ager living in the county - the least expensive type of family listed - would need $28,109 a year to be self-sufficient. That is more than double this year's federal poverty level for the same family.
According to Pearce, a single adult living in Baltimore needs to make $9.13 an hour - or $19,280 a year - to make ends meet. A worker leaving welfare in the city earns an average $7.40 an hour.
The "self-sufficiency standard" factors in expenses that the federal poverty level does not - the effects of taxes and tax credits, child care and health insurance. The study assumes that workers throughout Maryland need cars to get to their jobs.
The study, though, doesn't budget for what many families would consider basic provisions: retirement, saving for big-ticket items, or emergency money.
Families below the self-sufficiency standard make too much to qualify for government help, but too little to pay for what they need, Pearce said.
Ronald T. Haskins, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and one of the architects of the 1996 welfare reform law, thinks studies like Pearce's - with high income figures - obscure the fact that welfare reform has put many families on the road to better-paying jobs.
"The real argument is how much more should government do, and where are you going to get the money," he said.
In Maryland, Advocates for Children and Youth and the Center for Poverty Solutions helped publish the study, with Wider Opportunities for Women, a Washington-based advocacy organization.
Officials from those groups said they would use the study to lobby for higher wages for entry-level jobs, expanded tax credits and child care subsidies for low-income families, and targeted training to help workers with few skills move up the career ladder.
Jann Jackson, executive director of Advocates for Children and Youth, acknowledged that with the state facing a $1.7 billion budget shortfall, those pleas might not get much consideration when the General Assembly begins its session next month.
But "we may be able to stop some of the hemorrhaging" for poor families, she said. "We hope to use this to shape the dialogue."
