Arizona’s prison population is on the rise and the current fiscal year General Fund has $880 million budgeted for corrections. Read the series debut of Indicator Insight to learn about trends in crime rates, juvenile arrests, and recidivism.
The war on poverty during the 1960s succeeded, cutting the national poverty rate in half by the early 1970s. Since then, however, the poverty rate of Americans under the age of 65 has increased. The poverty rate has climbed particularly among children; compared to an average of 15.5 percent during the 1971-to-1975 economic cycle, the poverty rate in each of the three cycles since 1982 averaged between 18 percent and 21 percent. One-in-five children lives in poverty and Arizona has consistently experienced higher poverty rates than the national average for all age groups except seniors.
During the mid-part of the last decade, when the population growth rate was at its highest, the Phoenix area experienced rapid development and urban sprawl. The result has been an intensification of the Urban Heat Island effect. In this edition of Decades, author Sally Wittlinger discusses this uncomfortable consequence of urbanization.
Human services provide an important safety net for Arizonans and help many achieve self-sufficiency. But by the close of the last decade, the infrastructure was severely damaged by the recession – with shrinking resources at all levels of government, and across the entire spectrum of nonprofit organizations including faith communities.
The Highway User Revenue Fund (HURF), one of the primary sources of transportation funding, rapidly declined in available dollars at the end of the decade.
Arizona has seen positive trends in the areas of child welfare over the last decade. But as DES absorbs substantial cuts and staff reductions due to the recession, what will those numbers look like two, five, or ten years out?
During the previous decade Arizona experienced a dramatic increase in the number of people receiving health insurance coverage through the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS). If criteria for AHCCCS eligibility don’t change, it is unlikely that this trend will be reversed in the coming decade. More positive trends include increased child immunization rates and decreased smoking rates.
Author Tom Rex discusses how the long downward trend in high-technology industries in Arizona continued over the last decade.
Numerous tax cuts over the last 15 years have substantially reduced revenue to the Arizona state general fund and greatly narrowed the tax base.
The biggest economic trend in Arizona over the last decade has been the flat line on various measures of prosperity relative to the national average. Arizona always has been below the national average on measures such as the average wage, earnings per employee, and per capita personal income. However, Arizona compares less favorably now than it did in the 1970s and early 1980s.