Twenty Years After Welfare Reform, Child Poverty Is At an All-Time Low

forbes ^

[ChicagoConservative27]

On August 22, the 20th anniversary of welfare reform being signed into law, my new paper, “Poverty After Welfare Reform,” was released. It sprawled into a 45,000-word opus that ate my summer. Due to its length, the report has benefitted from a “Piketty Effect” in that criticism has been slow to come simply because it takes too much time to get through it.

But Slate Moneybox columnist Jordan Weissmann made it through, and he is not buying my claim that child hardship is lower or no higher than in 1996. Unlike many liberal commentators, Weissmann concedes that it is “basically uncontroversial” that child poverty fell after 1996. Even by the official measure—which overstates poverty and understates its decline over time—the likelihood that a child (or a child of a single mother) was poor in 2014 was lower than it was in 1996.

But the official poverty measure obscures how much child poverty has fallen. It does not include the value of noncash benefits in income when determining who falls below the poverty line. Nor does it account for benefits in the form of refundable tax credits for working families. Since taxes have fallen over time, the official measure’s reliance on pre-tax income understates how much disposable income has increased. And because it treats unmarried couples living together as separate families—a living arrangement that has grown more common—the official measure overstates poverty and understates its decline.

[Shanghai Dan]

Yeah, you say that, but we all know:

Women and children hit hardest.

[kabar]

[DoughtyOne]

Welfare reform. What a hoot.

It was a wholesale fraud perpetrated on the American public.

The Welfare rolls didn’t diminish. We still have a massive Welfare presence in our nation. We’re spending half a trillion dollars a year on it. We’re buying peace with it, and we’re not getting what we are paying for.

There are insidious portions of it too. Do people realize that people who work one or two days per week are considered “employed”, do not appear on unemployment rolls, and are counted on the worker rolls.

This skews the jobs reports considerably. Folks think we have more bodies in the work force than are actually there functioning full time.

It’s all smoke and mirrors. I hope that Trump will lay this system to waste, end it.

[dartuser]

Sweet, problem solved ... we can get rid of welfare now.

[DoughtyOne]

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[stylin19a]

Here's the secret sauce used for the premise of child poverty - From the report:

Child poverty overall fell between 1996 and 2014, after taking into account refundable tax credits and noncash benefits other than health coverage.
After including household heads’ live-in romantic partners in the family (i.e., cohabitation) as well, child poverty was lower in 2014 than at any point since at least 1979.

After also using the best available cost-of-living adjustment to update the poverty line and including health benefits as income, child poverty overall was lower by 5 percentage points in 2014 than in 1996 and is now at an all-time low.
And after partially adjusting these estimates for the tendency of families to underreport government benefits (a tendency that has been increasing), the child poverty rate in 2012 was just over 5%, compared with nearly 20% as indicated by the official poverty measure.

Here's for single parent child poverty:

Poverty among the children of single parents was at an all-time low in 2014 after including refundable tax credits and noncash benefits (other than health coverage) in income and counting household heads’ cohabiting partners as family.

After additionally adjusting the poverty line over time to better reflect the cost of living, and valuing health benefits as income, poverty among the children of single mothers fell by nearly 11 percentage points from 1996 to 2014. With the correction for underreporting (partial, because private sources of income remain underreported), the poverty rate among the children of single mothers was below 10% in 2012—lower than the official poverty rate for all children has ever been.

It doesn't take into account abortions.

Obama waived the work requirements in the welfare to work TANF Act(Temporary Assistance for Needy Families ) in 2012.

Despite that, child poverty has fallen a ton ?
Then poverty in general must have fell a ton ?
So budget requests for welfare benefits will be reduced ?

[Maudeen]

And how many babies didn’t make it to childhood to be counted. . .how many didn’t make it out of their mothers’ wombs at all.

[Terry L Smith]

I’m so glad that the same Clinton administration had efforts to remedy ‘child poverty’ in 1996, after they demonstrated their ‘child immollation’ process in Waco, in 1993, the International Year of The Child.