Lake Wobegon Days: half of American children are in the area of poverty

The idea that half of all American children live in poverty or close to being in poverty is not one that we want to be really comfortable entertaining. It would be a sign that our society is not taking care of the most vulnerable people within it, for example. And that is what a new report tells us now: that half of American children are either in or close to being in poverty. Therefore it is an eloquent demonstration of how society is organized.

Or, you know, maybe not? Because rather it depends on what you define as poverty and perhaps even more than what we define as near poverty. And indeed the definition used here is one that means that almost inevitably will be defining the American children half believe in or near poverty. Based on the definition of what is "near poverty" it is also very close in fact the median household income. And for those who receive no joke Garrison Keillor, average income is where we expect that half of households in the country to have more than half and less than income. So, if children are equally distributed among households (they are not) and defining near poverty as median income, then by definition, half of all children are near poverty.

And that's exactly what this again if communicating:

Almost half of US children live perilously close to the poverty line, according to a new study by the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. ABC of low-income children, the annual series profiling center on child poverty in the United States, illustrates the severity of the conditions of instability and economic poverty that more than 31 million children face throughout the United States. Using the latest data from the American Community Survey, the researchers found that NCCP while the total number of children in the US has remained roughly the same since 2008, today's children are more likely to live in families who can barely afford their basic needs.

Sounds terrible if even creepy, is not it?

However, perhaps the first thing to say about these numbers is that they are working from market revenues. In more detail, that's all cash income of any work that could be done in homes, in addition to cash welfare and social security. What these numbers do not include the impact of the things we do to reduce poverty, as it is actually experienced. The effects of Medicaid, SNAP, the EITC, free school meals, Section 8, in fact the whole plethora of some programs of poverty reduction 80 (other than payments of cash welfare lines) are completely ignored here. So it's not actually true that nearly half of American children live in poverty or close to it. What is certain is that if we have a welfare system benefits and then about half of American children would live in what the report describes as poverty or near poverty. Those two are not really the same thing at all. Which, considering we spent about $ 800 billion a year more or less in these programs poverty reduction is probably a good thing.

The second point that we can and must do is that Lake Wobegon one. His definition of poverty and poverty near:

NCCP defines a low-income household as one where incomes are below 200 percent of federal poverty level (for example, $ 48,016 for a family of four with two children in 2014). A family is considered poor if their income is below 100 percent of the poverty line (eg, $ 24,008 for a family of four with two children in 2014).

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