AZ ranked 47th in nation to be able to pay for basic needs - WAFB 9 News Baton Rouge, Louisiana News, Weather, Sports

Basic necessities are becoming harder and harder to afford for working families according to a new report called Low-Income Working Families: The Growing Economic Gap, out by the Working Poor Families Project.

Arizona ranked 47th out of all 50 states in the report. The report also shows that 39 percent of working families in Arizona are low-income families or 200 percent below the Federal Poverty Level. The report also included that of the 652,000 working families in Arizona that 255,000 families were low income.

The economy on the whole seems to be rebounding but more than 70 percent of low-income families and half of all poor families, nearly 1 in 3 working families, earned salaries so low that they could not pay for the basic necessities according to the report.

Further more the report shows the following statistics: 

• In the United States the number of low income working families increased from 10.2 million in 2010 to 10.4 million in 2011. 
• The total number of people in low income working families is 47.5 million.
• There were 23.5 million children in low-income working families in 2011.
• The richest 20 percent of working families took home nearly half of all income while those in the bottom 20 percent received less than 5 percent.

More information about the report can be found at www.workingpoorfamilies.org.

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