A 2016 report on poverty by the Hawaiʻi Appleseed Center for Law & Economic Justice offers startling statistics on the phenomenon.

“The low official unemployment rate (of 3.1 percent) obscures the reality for many of Hawaiʻi’s families; those who want a full-time job but can only find part-time work. Using the fuller metric of ‘real’ unemployment, close to one out of 10 people (9.7 percent) who would like to work full time in Hawaiʻi are either unemployed, underemployed or have not looked for a job during the past month,” says the report, written primarily by Nicole Woo, a senior policy analyst at Appleseed.

The Appleseed report provides a broader vision on how to break the downward cycle: get more money into the hands of poor people, because they usually live so close to the financial edge that the smallest problem can lead to a crisis.

More money also can break the generational cycle of children raised in poverty spending their whole lives in poverty.

“As poverty rates in a neighborhood increase above 20 percent, children’s opportunities for success are diminished,” the report notes. “Decades of research have shown that economically disadvantaged students perform less well in school, regardless of the quality of their education. More than 40 percent of the variation in average reading scores and nearly half in math scores is correlated with variations in child poverty rates. This achievement gap continues to widen as income inequality increases.”

The report concludes that helping families attain and maintain employment calls for policies that help workers care for their families. These include:

• Increasing opportunities for child-care subsidies.

• Early childhood education.

• Before-school and after-school programs.

• Paid family and medical leave.

• Long-term care.

• Programs to encourage asset building.

• Tax fairness measures including a low-income household renters credit.

• Eliminating income taxes on people in poverty.

• Creating a state-earned income tax credit to supplement the federal EITC, which is a refundable federal tax credit aimed at working families with especially low incomes. The report says this encourages work by allowing families to keep more of what they earn.

The Appleseed report says that even a reliable full-time job is not always the answer, if the job pays low wages. The minimum wage in Hawaiʻi rose to $8.50 on Jan. 1, 2016, will rise to $9 on Jan. 1, 2017, and to $10.10 on the same date in 2018.

Hawaiʻi’s residents earn the lowest wages in the country when adjusted for the cost of living, says the Appleseed report. A parent with a single child who works 40 hours a week at minimum wage would still live below the poverty level.

“People living at or near poverty are spending more than 50 percent of their incomes for housing, which leaves virtually nothing left for food, clothing, insurance, car repairs and everything else,” Geminiani says. “People in Hawaiʻi are pressed to the max in terms of survival.”