An American who starts with nothing but works hard can support a family and raise children who start with something more.

It’s the American Dream.

Eric Fleischauer Capital considerations

The Basic Economic Security Tables for Alabama, prepared by Wider Opportunities for Women and the Community Action Association of Alabama, is a precise study of how much Alabama families need in wages to meet their basic expenses.

The expenses are estimates, but they are based in reality. A Morgan County family with two adult workers, a teenager and a preschooler, for example, must pay about $433 per month for housing; $168 per month for utilities and $735 for food. It includes estimated expenses for child care, transportation, health care, emergency savings and other necessary costs.

Such a family must have a combined income of $61,656 a year — that is, two workers with average wages of $14.60 per hour — to maintain minimal economic security. The wages must be higher if the family wants to buy a home or save for the children’s higher education.

Basic: $26,268

Statewide, a single worker without children must make $26,268 per year for this basic level of economic security. A single worker with an infant needs wages of $37,476.

Each worker in a family with two workers, a preschooler and a school-age child must make $28,920 per year in order to achieve economic security.

While the study incorporates all necessary family expenses, it does not include an expense item for accumulating capital. This is significant, because our economic system requires capital for entrepreneurship, the classic path to the American Dream. Nor does it include an expense item for an adult to obtain work training or higher education, a common path to wages that permit the accumulation of capital.

Poverty guideline

The study is a reminder of the limits of the federal poverty guideline, the income level that governs most forms of public assistance. A single worker in Alabama requires more than twice the poverty amount for economic security. It also adds a footnote to the minimum wage, which is just over half the amount a single person needs for economic security.

In other words, people surviving at the federal poverty level are not just poor, they are destitute. Another minimum wage job in a community is nothing that should trigger much excitement.

The study also helps those of us who believe we have lived the American Dream — pulled ourselves up by the bootstraps without help from others — realize that inheritances come in many forms.

Childcare for an infant, for example, costs about $474 per month. If we had an infant but did not pay that much, it probably means we received assistance from a family member.

If we did not maintain emergency savings, it may have been because we have a family member who we knew, in an emergency, would help out. If we attended college, our expenses and temporary loss of income more than likely were the result of someone else’s assistance.

Through 2018 in Alabama, based on estimates by the state Department of Industrial Relations, only 16 percent of new jobs will provide economic security for a single parent with two children.

Only half of new jobs will offer economic security for a two-parent family with two children.

Our economic system has forced many Alabamians into a poverty from which they cannot escape. They cannot accumulate capital and they cannot provide an education that will permit their children to do so.

To see the full BEST report, go to www.caaalabama.org.

Contact Eric Fleischauer at eric@decaturdaily.com.