Saturday, May 17, 2014

The Oregon counties the "recovery" forgot

Poverty in Oregon: Interactive maps show food stamps, welfare, Medicaid reliance by county
Nearly five years after the Great Recession officially ended, more than one in five Oregonians continues to rely on food stamps, and nearly 17 percent live in poverty.

Rural Oregon counties continue to fare the worst, with food stamps and Medicaid rates exceeding 30 percent in Jefferson and Josephine counties. In some timber-reliant counties, the poverty rate exceeds 20 percent.

The Oregonian mapped state and county unemployment, poverty, food stamps, welfare and Medicaid rates using January 2014 numbers from the Oregon Department of Human Services. The figures show slight improvements from last summer, when The Oregonian last mapped poverty by county. But it's clear that the state continues to struggle and that rural Oregon continues to be left behind in the recovery. [...]
The article has a link to an Interactive Oregon Poverty map that is quite revealing.
     

2 comments:

MAX Redline said...

Ya, down in your neck of the woods, the economy really sucks. Portland claims to be doing great, but Integra Telecom moved its headquarters (and 500 jobs) north into Vancouver, and despite millions in taxpayer "investment", Vestas is moving to Colorado.

Be nice if you guys could get some of the Elliott sold so you could get some logging, but the Coos Bay facility ought to help, as well.

Chas said...

The environmentalists are already moving to put a stop to any logging prospects on Elliot land.

And now that Oregon has spent nearly a quarter of a billion dollars on "Cover Oregon", only to abandon it, I hate to think what that is going to do to our taxes. And the so-called "recovery", assuming any part of it was real to begin with.

Is it any wonder businesses here are moving out to other states? Costs here just keep going up, and the government just keeps spending without accountability. How can anything genuinely improve under those circumstances?