The Latest Pre-Election Bait And Switch On Poverty Statistics

September 13, 2022 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian 

 It’s September, in an even year. Labor Day has passed. The big mid-terms are less than two months away. It’s time for a pre-election bait and switch on poverty statistics to deceive any low information voters who aren’t paying attention to how the poverty scam works.

The poverty scam has been a big topic over the years at this blog, although perhaps less so in the most recent couple of years. This link will take you to all my prior posts on Poverty, some 129 in total. The most important recurring theme has been that the government cynically manipulates the poverty statistics so that the official measured rate of poverty never goes meaningfully down, no matter how much taxpayer money is spent, thus manufacturing a fake basis to hit up the people for ever increasing funding at regular intervals.

But there is an exception. When a big election is coming up and the Democrats are in power, suddenly alternative statistics magically emerge showing that poverty has dropped dramatically, all of course due to compassionate programs put in place by the Democrats. And thus we have two pieces from the front page of the New York Times in the past two days. From yesterday, it’s “A Quiet, Dramatic Blow to Childhood Poverty” (different headline in online version); and today it’s “Families Lifted By Safety Net Tell Their Stories” (again, different headline online). Both have the by-line of long-time Times “poverty” reporter Jason DeParle.

Before getting to a detailed consideration of the two latest pieces from the Times, let’s have a review of some history. My first post on what I called the “poverty scam” goes all the way back to the very beginning of this blog in November 2012. That linked post pointed out that almost all government “anti-poverty” spending was in-kind, rather than in cash, and that the Census Bureau systematically and cynically excluded all in-kind spending and tax credits when calculating its official measure of poverty. Thus, no matter how much money was spent via these programs, the poverty rate would never go down, and the seemingly high poverty rate could regularly be used as a basis to advocate for yet more anti-poverty spending. From the November 2021 post:

There is nothing honest about the exclusion of in-kind benefits from the definition of poverty. The main results of the exclusion are (1) the public thinks that the "poverty" rate is measuring something about material deprivation, but it is not, and (2) additional spending, even hundreds of billions of dollars of it, cannot ever make any dent in the poverty rate, even as the government spends more per family in poverty than the median income of a family of four in the entire country.

And that was indeed the usual order of things year after year. But then we came up on the 2016 election. Barack Obama was President, the Democrats ran the government, and Hillary Clinton was running for President against Donald Trump. Suddenly things changed. In September 2016 the Census Bureau came out with a suspiciously-timed big Report showing large gains in median household income, and a big drop in the poverty rate, from 2014 to 2015. On September 25, 2016 — the day of the first presidential debate — the New York Times weighed in with a big article headlined “With Pay Rising, Millions Climb Out of Poverty”:

3.5 million Americans . . . were able to raise their chins above the poverty line last year, according to census data released this month.

I responded with a post on September 27 titled “Fraudulent Advocacy For Government Growth.” That post noted that the supposed sudden drop in poverty actually resulted from changes in methodology by which Census compiled the statistics — particularly some conveniently-timed additional efforts to track un- and under-reported income. Whatever.

As soon as the election was over, and Trump installed in office, the Census Bureau and the usual advocacy groups resumed the use of the standard inflated poverty statistics, now mostly in the effort to bash the hated President Trump. Consider a few headlines covering 2017-2020, the years of the Trump presidency:

• From the New York Times, September 13, 2018, author Glenn Thrush, “U.S. Recovery Eludes Many Living Below Poverty Level, Census Suggests”: “On Wednesday, the Census Bureau released its 2017 annual report on the poor that offered a stark counterpoint, suggesting that the national recovery has bypassed many of the 40 million to 45 million Americans estimated to be living below the federal poverty level.” It’s fascinating how, exactly the same amount of time before a mid-term election as today, the narrative was 180 degrees the opposite with Trump in office instead of Biden.

• From the American Academy of Pediatrics, September 14, 2021: ”About . . .16.1% of children lived in poverty in 2020, according to new reports from the U.S. Census Bureau. The 2020 child poverty rate marks an increase from 14.4% in 2019. About 11.6 million children and adolescents under age 18 lived in poverty in 2020, an increase of 1.1 million from 2019.

• From the Children’s Defense Fund, May 3, 2021, “The State of America’s Children 2020”: “Children remain the poorest age group in America. Nearly 1 in 6 lived in poverty in 2018—nearly 11.9 million children (see Table 2). The child poverty rate (16 percent) is nearly one-and-a-half times higher than that for adults.”

• From the New York Times, May 7, 2022, by-line Bruce Covert: “We Pay to Keep the Old Out of Poverty. Why Won’t We Do the Same for the Young?”: 

  “The United States has an incredibly high child poverty rate. Nearly one in seven children lives in a poor family. By comparison, fewer than 10 percent of adults are poor, and under 9 percent of those age 65 and over are. Child poverty also doesn’t fall evenly across demographics: 71 percent of poor children are Black, Hispanic or Native American. . . . There’s a very simple reason for this: We don’t give parents enough money to raise their children.”

Well, welcome to September 2022. With less than two months remaining to the election, it’s time for a temporary 180 degree narrative change to prove that all the spending programs are actually working. From DeParle’s piece yesterday:

For a generation or more, America’s high levels of child poverty set it apart from other rich nations, leaving millions of young people lacking support as basic as food and shelter amid mounting evidence that early hardship leaves children poorer, sicker and less educated as adults. But with little public notice and accelerating speed, America’s children have become much less poor. A comprehensive new analysis shows that child poverty has fallen 59 percent since 1993, with need receding on nearly every front.

Since 1993? In other words, this Times piece completely contradicts the official left-wing narrative covering the Trump years, including the pieces linked above from the AAP, CDF, and even in the Times itself. Here is the Times’s chart of the decline in child poverty since 1993:

Note that the chart goes only to 2019, and reflects a dramatic decline in child poverty on Trump’s watch, and nothing about the Biden time period — although you won’t find any mention of that in the text of the article.

So how could the likes of the AAP, the CDF, and the Times’s own Messrs. Thrush and Covert have missed this? The answer is that there is nothing real here, and it’s only the usual statistical legerdemain to support the narrative needed for this particular moment. The labels in the chart give away the game. For the current purpose, we are now counting in-kind benefits and tax credits, notably the earned-income tax credit and the child tax credit (as well as food stamps, as the text of the article makes clear). In other words, this is the so-called “Supplemental Poverty Measure,” rather than the usual “Official Poverty Measure,” in which these handouts would have been arbitrarily excluded. When AAP, CDF and the Times wanted to bash Trump, they used the Official Poverty Measure, which contained more useful figures for that purpose.

Note that I’m not by any means saying that the Supplemental Poverty Measure is any more honest than the Official Poverty Measure. The SPM has its own major problems, some of which I have previously covered, for example here. It’s just that the Times, and its compatriots in left-wing advocacy, cherry-pick whatever statistics they need to support the official narrative of the moment. Once the election is over, the business about the child poverty rate going down is highly likely to disappear as we go back to the usual line about extraordinarily high child poverty in the United States. Statistics from the Official Poverty Measure will be used to support that narrative. How many people will be able to figure out that they are being played?