A recent survey issued by United Way lays bare the financial strains increasingly pinching Floridians, revealing that over half of Florida households are gainfully employed but still struggling to make ends meet.
Four million out of 8.8 million households in the state were poor or couldn’t afford “the basic cost of living in their county” in 2022, the year that the study focused on. Public help was not an option for many.
Drawing on statistics compiled by the Federal Reserve and the United States Census, the report refrains from assigning blame. After a time of inflation and the termination of epidemic public assistance, a number of policy experts have argued that the state government of Florida should do more to keep the state from being unaffordable for middle-class and lower-class Floridians.
In an email to the Times/Herald, Sadaf Knight—chief executive officer of the left-leaning Florida Policy Institute—said, “To boost Floridians’ fiscal stability, we need to ensure that state lawmakers are fully investing in people and communities across the board.” For Floridians who are already struggling financially, this means implementing specific tax cuts.
An increasing number of Florida homes are struggling to make ends meet. Official statistics show that 13% of households are now living below the federal poverty line, which is $31,200 for a family of four.
When considering the financial difficulties faced by families, this placed Florida at number 44 out of all 50 states and DC.
The United Way uses an acronym meaning asset limited, income constrained, and employed (ALICE) to describe the situation in which a household is most likely to be living; 60% of Black homes and 52% of Hispanic households in Florida fell below this level, according to the research.
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Many people in the state’s low-wage industry, including security guards, fast food and counter workers, cooks, stockers, and order fillers, were also expected to have a hard time.
Feeling better?
Wauchula Republican Ben Albritton, who will soon be president of the Florida Senate, said that lawmakers are already hard at work finding solutions to the state’s affordability problems.
“In Tallahassee, we have worked on short and long-term solutions to help keep our state affordable for young families, retirees, and everyone in between,” Albritton told the Times/Herald in an email.
A lot of obstacles stand in the way of working Floridians.
Expenditures for housing, food, and transportation for a single adult in Florida rose from $28,344 to $30,084 between 2021 and the following year, according to the analysis.
It went up from $66,324 to $81,120 for four-person families with a preschooler and an infant.
Tax credits for households in Florida went back to 2020 levels after the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act expired in 2021, further straining already tight budgets.
The governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, has long held that President Joe Biden is to blame for the inflation that he has caused. As a countermeasure, he pushed for a reduction in automobile tolls and tax incentives for diapers and other home items last year.
Aside from advocating for investments in workforce initiatives and trade apprenticeships, he also signed into law measures to increase the state’s supply of affordable housing.
However, he did sign a bill this year that prevents municipalities from charging contractors more than the state’s minimum wage, which is scheduled to reach $15/hour in 2026. Local governments were prohibited from implementing rent restrictions by him last year.
In addition, he mandated that businesses based outside of Florida begin collecting sales taxes in 2021, which resulted in an annual increase of $1 billion in taxes on Floridians. Corporations effectively received a tax benefit from the ruling.
The expansion of Medicaid to encompass working poor people is another policy that DeSantis and the legislature have rejected. Last year, during the second GOP presidential debate, a Fox News host questioned DeSantis about Florida’s higher-than-average proportion of uninsured.
A population boom has occurred here. As for welfare benefits, Florida does not have a lot either, DeSantis said. “Like, this is a field of dreams, you can do well in the state, but we’re not going to have a huge influx of people on government programs without work requirements like California,” they add.
The Times/Herald reached out to DeSantis’s office for comment, but they did not answer.
Current Project Ongoing
According to Knight, CEO of the Florida Policy Institute, policymakers can take steps to alleviate the situation by, for example, expanding access to subsidized child care, making voluntary pre-K all day, and creating a program to give tax rebates to working-class families.
The new president of the Florida Senate, Albritton, said that in an effort to reduce property taxes, legislators reduced the levy on insurance policies and placed a constitutional amendment on the ballot.
Legislators have made “huge investments in affordable housing and school choice, so more families have options for where they live and how their children are educated,” Albritton added.
“There is no question that families here in Florida are feeling it,” Albritton said, adding that there is always space for improvement and more work to be done and that inflation is “having a serious impact across the country.”
And yet, he maintained that lawmakers had enacted “historic tax relief packed with tax holidays and permanent tax relief that helps lower the cost of raising children and aging with dignity.”
House Speaker-elect Danny Perez (R-Miami), who will be Albritton’s opponent in April, stated to WLPGLocal 10 News that affordability was “the greatest issue” confronting the state. Attempts to reach him for comment regarding this story were unsuccessful.
A more expensive state is the result of a cascade of issues, according to the United Way’s report, which also adds that the number of Florida households with limited financial resources has been rising continuously since the Great Recession.
Nearly half of all households with incomes below the United Way’s asset-limited, income-constrained, and employed criteria paid rent in 2022, the year state and federal eviction laws were lifted.
Disruption to essentials, funds, and balances
The report states:
Food, transportation, and healthcare costs were among the most basic necessities that families in the state could not afford.
Though “wage increases… were not enough to make up for years of falling behind,” the median retail sales pay in Florida increased to $14.03 in 2022, which meant that most low-paying jobs had wage improvements.
One of the biggest expenses was child care. “Parents have fewer options due to provider shortages and lack of affordable care,” the research states.
Nearly half of the Black and Hispanic households in Florida that were financially strapped did not have access to health care.
The survey indicated that the number of households below the threshold has increased the most among seniors, indicating that they are also experiencing financial challenges.
The survey states that many older persons have had to keep working due to rising prices and inadequate retirement funds. “Within 2022, nearly 218,000 Floridians were working, and nearly 1.6 million seniors living below the ALICE threshold had no retirement savings beyond Social Security.”
National household debt levels increased by $184 billion in Q1 2024, according to data from the Federal Reserve.
The total amount of all credit card balances is $1.12 trillion, up 13.1% over the previous year. “Those are real impacts,” remarked Albritton, who will soon be the lead senator from Florida.
While Floridians are struggling to make ends meet, DeSantis has used the state’s growing funds to pay down the debt ahead of schedule and put $17 billion into reserves—points he has stated time and time again during his campaign.
According to Karen Woodall, a lobbyist with the Florida Center for Fiscal and Economic Policy, Republican legislative leaders and DeSantis have made things worse for Floridians.
According to her, it is “criminal” that the state has been hoarding so much money rather than distributing it to its residents.
“The people of this state are in this situation for no apparent reason,” Woodall stated.
