I think this has already been mostly? partly? challenged. Let me find the link, you lazy ass.

You can start here and follow the link to the article.

Author's response here.

Before I finish reading the back-and-forths over methodology, I'll push their attempt to attribute anything to 1996 welfare "reform" out of the way: the 1996 law turned AFDC into TANF with work requirements, but also made it basically dwindle to nothing over time, while SNAP and EITC, which are closer to entitlements and less overtly cruel (SNAP doesn't have work requirements for families with dependents; EITC requires one dollar of employment income and up) are the main government programs materially reducing child poverty. And to some extent Medicaid and CHIP.

4: I believe Drum has posted charts showing that Federal spending on poverty programs has been steady or grown despite welfare reform, precisely bc other programs rose to replace diminished TANF.

IOW, welfare as we knew it really did end, but the gov't never stopped spending money to keep people out of poverty.

2,3: Bruenig's a troll, so I tend to assume his criticism is dishonest. Beyond that, obviously the whole point is measuring poverty after gov't spending, so I have no idea why that's supposed to be the wrong measure--I've seen that sort of claim in lots of spaces before, and if it's not dishonest, it's incredibly stupid. Unless you're trying to make some specific point about labor force & wages, after-transfer income is the only appropriate way to look at poverty levels.

I did not find Bruenig's response particularly convincing.

He took issue with a threshold based definition of poverty, preferring a relative definition of poverty based on median income. But a median based definition of poverty depends on the underlying wage distribution - if everyone got 20 times more income next year, child poverty wouldn't change under such a definition.

He took issue with the earned income tax credit on the ground that not every eligible person gets it, not every eligible person gets the full amount, and it is delivered in a lump sum after the tax year in which the person qualified for it.

With regards to the first two points, if all we need to do to obtain the wonderful outcome described by researchers is ensure that everyone gets all the eitc they deserve, then shouldn't that be our policy focus?

With regards to the last point, it's not like that lump sum vanishes - it's available for the next year. And the eitc for that year is presumably available for the year after that.
So I'm not seeing the objection.

EITC Is really effective in getting people right under the poverty line over the poverty line. It is really bad at helping the poorest of the poor. It is like if you defined funko pop poverty as having less than 3 funko pops and then had a program to give people with two funko pops an extra funko pop. Very effective program on paper. Much more effective than giving people with o funko pops 2 funko pops which does not push them over the funko pop poverty line.

7.3: If you're measuring poverty you need to see how much money people actually have, not what they would have in a world that the EITC worked perfectly - so I think that criticism is absolutely valid.

If the conclusion is that we need to do more to help people to get the EITC due to them, that's an important thing to know.

the 1996 law turned AFDC into TANF with work requirements, but also made it basically dwindle to nothing over time

States also have an enormous amount of discretion over how to use their TANF allocation with little oversight, which is how Mississippi was able to use theirs to build a volleyball stadium for Brett Favre.

I haven't read any of this or looked at the data or attempts to debunk the data, because I am fuming that they couldn't permanently extend the expanded child tax credit.

10: I suppose I could look it up, but can someone explain to me why Brett Favre needed or wanted a volleyball stadium? Upon reflection, the whole concept of a volleyball stadium is odd to me.

I thought the volleyball money was because his daughter played there.

13: So, is this another case, like Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman, of celebrities trying a little too hard to be good parents?

I only know what I skimmed from headlines. I guess Favre's scandal would be comparable to Loughlin and Huffman if the volleyball money was linked to his daughter getting admitted to the school?

Aunt Becky may have bribed a university official but she didn't steal from welfare funds.

15: It's not clear to me what if anything Favre was contributing. It says he was credited with raising most of the money for the stadium, but I'm not sure if he found more donations besides the illegally channeled TANF. Him personally getting paid over a million for "promoting" USM suggests it was mostly about currying favor with him.

The University of Southern Mississippi isn't really selective enough for an admissions bribery scandal, but yes, it was because his daughter played volleyball there. It's actually a small part of a huge scandal that should really be getting more attention than it is.

When I first heard about it I thought it was maybe one of those things where they were using CDBG or something similar on a project that technically qualifies for the funds but really benefits someone else in a shady way. But no, it's much worse! Straight up stealing from the poor to allow the rich to play volleyball (among many other things).

And the whole state administration was in on it! The latest twist is leaked text messages showing that Favre was nervous about whether the source of the funds would ever become public (which, yes, good thing to worry about as we're seeing now) and that the then-governor personally approved of the illegal misappropriation.

14, 15 etc: I didn't mean to suggest that it had anything to do with admissions, just that the celebrity chose crime in order to give their kid a special favor.

The whole thing is so grotesque -- all the Mississippi state officials saw this money that was supposed to go to help the needy and thought "Wheeee! Free money!!!!"

The most baffling part to me is the near-total lack of any oversight or accountability, especially from a federal grantee perspective. HUD makes us provide receipts for every nail.

The manicurist must be annoyed.

That's because you're not a star quarterback.

I'm John Stamos.

More on how TANF is abused all over the country, not just in Turkmenistan-by-the-Delta:

Some states are playing a paper game in which they're claiming to meet their own TANF funding obligations by counting donations, services and volunteer hours by nonprofits such as food banks and Boys and Girls Clubs.

Some states are spending big chunks of TANF money on programs used by families who aren't in poverty, such as on preschool and college scholarships for middle-class students.

Many states are using TANF dollars for programs unrelated to work activities, from child welfare to drug courts. Often, those programs already are being paid for by other state agencies, and officials simply count those costs as TANF spending.

The University of Southern Mississippi isn't really selective enough for an admissions bribery scandal

Whether this was meant to be funny or just a statement of fact, it really made me laugh.

It was both. Glad it was appreciated.

i remember when the og celeb parents scandal broke & my then office next door neighbor/ appellate mentor at prior frim used to drift into my doorway mid- afternoon a couple of days a week with a far away look on his face & muse aloud incredulously "for usc ... they risked it all for ... usc..."

https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2022/09/15/the-child-trends-child-poverty-series-is-a-statistical-blip-caused-by-census-changes/

https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2022/09/15/the-child-trends-child-poverty-series-is-a-statistical-blip-caused-by-census-changes/

https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2022/09/15/the-child-trends-child-poverty-series-is-a-statistical-blip-caused-by-census-changes/

https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2022/09/15/the-child-trends-child-poverty-series-is-a-statistical-blip-caused-by-census-changes/

https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2022/09/15/the-child-trends-child-poverty-series-is-a-statistical-blip-caused-by-census-changes/

@30

The Census folks don't seem to think that the changes in how income questions were asked substantially affected measured poverty rates.

https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/working-papers/2019/demo/sehsd-wp2019-05-poster.pdf

Say what you will of Biden, at least he's making the trains run on time.

On the topic of the census/American Community Survey, there are now fewer white Texans than non-white Texans. The state has been minority-majority since 2004, but this is now saying that Hispanics are the largest plurality. Semi-coincidentally, that threshold was also crossed at Heebie U for the first time this semester.

It's kind of wild how much the demographics have changed here since I started teaching here in 2006: it was roughly 70% white back then, and now it's ~39%.

37: As previously discussed, isn't that partly because of Hispanics now identifying as non-white? Not nearly as many do in Texas as do in other states, but certainly more than in the past.

Or do you mean fewer white-non-Hispanic Texans than other?

And I credit myself with that change.

OK, looking at the footnote of the Texas Tribune article it does seem that "white non-Hispanic" has dropped below "Hispanic of any race".

37: No wonder white people are feeling anxious and clinging to their dominant status in fantasy worlds.

Although it is interesting that the slow decline of "white" in the chart seems to have been goosed in 2020, along with a rise in "Other". More liminal people re-identifying?

39: It's a Hispanic Serving Institution.

@42

The Census Bureau was ostensibly concerned about the number of Hispanics listing "other" as their race. So they wanted to combine the Race and Ethnicity questions on the census.

Trump prevented the Census Bureau from combining the questions. At the time, NPR questioned this decision, stating "the Census Bureau] will also continue asking about those topics as two questions, despite its own research showing that changes could encourage more census participants to provide race and ethnicity data."

But the Census Bureau still chose to add lists of exemplary ethnicities for each race on the 2020 census (the 2010 census lacked such examples). They just chose to call these ethnicities "example groups" and "example population groups." The exemplary ethnicities listed were ostensibly chosen as being "the largest population groups within each of the geographically diverse population groups of each race category, as defined by the 1997 OMB standards."

The exemplary ethnicities for the racial group white were "German, Irish, English, Italian, Lebanese, Egyptian."

Unsurprisingly, even though a 2021 Pew report found that 60% of Hispanics identified as white, Hispanics did not see themselves in that list of exemplary ethnicities Instead, a plurality of Hispanics chose to label themselves "some other race."

One might think that the Census Bureau would consider this a failure - after all, wasn't an increase in "some other race" the outcome that they were ostensible attempting to avoid? But no, they took a victory lap instead.

It's also worth pointing out that 2020 was right in the midst of a partially successful effort to move the notion of "whiteness" away from achievements in the arts, sciences, etc and into a synonym for "petulant asshole."

I read the 44 excerpt to imply that there was a creeping toward "other" separate from however much extra the 2020 Census methods might have done, but then I looked at the ACS results over time and there seems to be a discontinuity in 2021 there as well

ACS percentage of "some other race" (single) and "two or more races", irrespective of ethnicity:
2006-2010: 5.5% / 2.4%
2011-2015: 4.7% / 3.4%
2016-2020: 5.1% / 5.2%
2021: 7.2% / 12.6%

I wouldn't have guessed this before seeing these numbers, but maybe people whom the 2020 Census inadvertently nudged to switch one or more of their races to "Other", since then, are doing the same even in an ACS designed differently? Either that or it's mostly Trump and George Floyd.

AIHSHB, the idea that brown Hispanics aren't granted a race by the official
category-makers is bizarre and skews their work because it's so out of step with the thinking of the people they're trying to measure.

Right, but won't someone think of the real problem? I have to analyze data and I need two things for that: stable measures and reasonable cell sizes.

Are you trying to turn Hispanics into a date?

Not since I got married.

37: Recent survey work I'm involved with found only 3 respondents out of over 300 who identified themselves as anything other than "white", which caused some concern until I pointed out that the most recent census found that the region is 98.6% white, so I think we're OK, representationally speaking.

This does not of course stop well-meaning people insisting that all our posters etc must feature racially mixed groups. I think there are probably now more nonwhite people in our public information output over the last year than there actually are in the entire region.

re: 52

I'm entirely OK with the idea that publicity material should be inclusive, even if that means statistically inaccurate.

But I have seen some really hilarious examples of it in the past. In the mid 90s I used to live near a Glasgow council office that had a lot of publicity material for Gaelic language education in the window. There was one leaflet in the window advertising, iirc, Gaelic nursery or primary school provision, which had about eight adults on the cover, only one or two of whom were white. I don't know how many non-white Gaelic speakers there are in Scotland,* but it's not zero (there's an interesting blog post here: https://gal-dem.com/what-its-like-being-a-person-of-colour-in-the-scottish-gaelic-community/ ), so I think it's great that the publicity material didn't just show a lot of white people with ginger hair, but clearly someone had just selected a diverse publicity image from some stock photo library without thinking about where it was being used.

* and the one family I know who send their kids to a Gaelic medium primary school aren't Scottish.

I'm entirely OK with the idea that publicity material should be inclusive, even if that means statistically inaccurate.

OTOH people know what their communities look like, and respond less well to publicity that looks like it comes from agencies who don't.

35

This is the part of the change that likely affected the child poverty rates:

"By family type, poverty rates decrease for primary families and increase for unrelated individuals and those in related
subfamilies"

I don't know how many non-white Gaelic speakers there are in Scotland

Quite a few, once you aim off for there not being many white Gaelic speakers in Scotland either. My mum was on a bus in Glasgow a few years ago and heard Gaelic being spoken behind her, turned round and saw a Pakistani family chatting away - she went over and said hello and turned out they were from Stornoway, where they'd lived for three generations, and various uncles and cousins now ran corner shops* up and down the Hebrides. And of course they'd grown up in the Hebrides so they spoke Gaelic.

*very few corner shops sensu stricto in the Hebrides as most towns consist of one street, hence no real corners

IME the pictures representing the aspirations but not reality is often the source of hilarity especially in college recruiting brochures. About a decade ago the university was doing some publicity shots that included my department, but focused on me, the only woman professor, in action teaching, and then pulled two students (one Black, one Asian-American) out for a special photo shoot with the department chair. Lookit the inclusivity of the middle-aged white man! It was basically that episode of Scrubs where Turk is in ALL the marketing materials as the lone Black surgeon. The students laughed a LOT about this and as I recall we had a pretty good spontaneous discussion about race, gender, performance, etc.

@55

But the measured impact is a 0.1% decrease in poverty for families (and 0.05% decrease overall) with larger increases in poverty in other subcategories - how does that become the massive decrease in the data?

@55

But the measured impact is a 0.1% decrease in poverty for families (and 0.05% decrease overall) with larger increases in poverty in other subcategories - how does that become the massive decrease in the data?

If the diversity efforts echo Scrubs more than The Office then that's probably a good thing.

I'm still on episode 2 of The Office. But now I need ru wait for it to get back on Netflix.

56 is fascinating.

Agree that 56 is fascinating, but the Isle of Lewis is only .5% Asian, and the rest of the Western Isles are lower than that. There's something like 100 Asian people on the whole Western Isles, it's not at all unlikely that the extended family in 56 represents the overwhelming majority of Gaelic-speaking Scots-Pakistanis.

https://www.cne-siar.gov.uk/media/5560/lewis-profile.pdf
https://www.cne-siar.gov.uk/media/5561/north-uist-profile.pdf

(Looking into this did lead to the interesting story of the new mosque in Stornoway: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/may/11/first-mosque-opens-on-stornaway-outer-hebrides-in-time-for-ramadan)

Ramadan would be rough in Scotland in the summer.

True, though it can get a lot worse on that front:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/shetland-has-plans-in-store-for-uks-most-northerly-mosque-kmnnkjxzm

Unsurprisingly, Tromsø has the record on that front.

Wait, Mastriano is also a carpetbagger from New Jersey? How is this just coming out now?

When he was serving in the first Iraq war he requested a New Jersey flag to display! And they gave him one!

Which is super weird, honestly. Who cares about the New Jersey flag?

Dr. Oz?

Probably. Maybe he flew one while serving in the Turkish army.

What a weird election cycle.

Disproportionate number of Republican assholes in NJ compared to their chances of winning anything big?

Compared to Pennsylvania, though? It's hardly lacking in Republican assholes itself. Plus, NJ's Republican assholes win big at least as often as PA's. Chris Christie served two terms as governor!

Yes, we're not lacking in Republican assholes. Maybe they can't talk in complete sentences?

Wow, 67, 68 is amazing.

Maybe they can't talk in complete sentences?

Herschel Walker is busy proving that doesn't matter.

Maybe they all have their penis stuck in a jar of fluffernutter?

we're not lacking in Republican assholes

Very nearly every Republican has one.

I haven't looked.

Are people always playing The Smiths lately because something happened? Or maybe the news of people mourning the queen makes people think "sad + English"?

I guess they had an album called. "The Queen is Dead".

Marketing genius.

Drunk guy at the bar alluding to his ability to kill people.

Not me. I'm overhearing.

83 like this: https://youtu.be/kPb1By9ay48?t=280 (that link goes to the story behind this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEEN5K2bddI)

86 should have been to 84 (Drunk guy at the bar alluding to his ability to kill people. )