THE COST OF POVERTY

• By SARAH CHACKO
• Advocate Capitol News Bureau
• Published: Apr 12, 2009
• Editor's Note: This is the second story in a series about poverty, an issue that negatively touches every Louisianian in some way.

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Louisiana last year spent nearly a third of its $29.5 billion budget on the poverty that afflicts at least a quarter of the state’s population.

But it’s hard to know whether that $9.1 billion — spent through 90 programs under 13 different state offices — addressed any of the root causes of poverty or even relieved some of its effects.

Gov. Bobby Jindal says he wants to reconfigure the delivery system for that aid with an eye toward better measuring the effectiveness of the programs. The goals, he said, are to more efficiently help the poor on a short-term basis while building a long-term attack on the causes of poverty.

Officials in both the Jindal administration and in the private charity community say various programs run by different groups and agencies often overlap, causing some anti-poverty efforts to be over-funded and others to be starved for money.

“What will be helpful to drive even more coordination is a budgeting process and programmatic process that focuses on outcomes,” Jindal said in a recent interview.

“If we drive more outcomes-based investments, that’ll force these departments to work together  even more than creating another level of bureaucracy.”

Reducing poverty — and wisely spending the money used to do so — would free up funds for improving roads, building better schools and hospitals, and expanding quality-of-life programs, experts say.

Hard to track

In 2007, about 150,000 families — roughly 15 percent of all families in the state — lived below the federal poverty level, a weekly income of $397 for a family of four. An equal number have incomes within $100 of the poverty line, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Twenty-seven percent of Louisiana’s children live in poverty, the Census Bureau states.

To combat poverty, the state spends about $8.6 billion — mostly federal pass-through money — on programs such as food stamps that directly target families whose incomes fall within a certain range of the federal poverty level.

Other services, such as those offered for people with disabilities, are not always dictated by income, but most of the recipients have low incomes. Those programs totaled another $450 million.

Nonprofit groups, welfare advocates and economists have long wondered how much money is scattered throughout the state to cover the problem of poverty.