A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty (2019) / Chapter Skim
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1 Introduction
1 Introduction
Pages 19-32
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From page 19... ...
The number of children in deep poverty was calculated by multiplying the percentage of people under age 18 with family incomes below 50 percent of the SPM poverty threshold by the number of children under age 18 in the United States (estimated to be 73.7 million in 2017 by the U.S. Census Bureau)
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From page 20... ...
Child poverty rates in the United States would be much higher were it not for programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) , which provides nutrition assistance benefits to low-income individuals, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)
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From page 21... ...
THE COMMITTEE'S CHARGE Given the problems generated by child poverty in the United States and the demonstrated effectiveness of many child poverty programs, the omnibus appropriations bill signed into law in December 2015 included a provision directing the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to conduct a comprehensive study of child poverty in the United States. Specifically, the study was to provide an evidence-based, nonpartisan analysis of the macroeconomic, health, and crime/social costs of child poverty, to study current efforts aimed at reducing poverty, and to propose recommendations with the goal of reducing the number of children living in poverty in the United States by one-half in 10 years.2 This policy goal mirrors the aims of anti-poverty initiatives that have been undertaken in other English-speaking countries in the past two decades, most notably in the United Kingdom beginning in 1997 (Waldfogel, 2010; see also Chapter 4)
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From page 22... ...
In addition to traditional anti-poverty programs, such as cash transfers, food and nutrition programs, and housing programs, the committee considered work support, health insurance, foster youth, juvenile and adult justice, and education and training programs. For each program and policy option it developed, the committee attempted to estimate what impact it could have on reducing child poverty as defined using the SPM; how its poverty-reducing impacts would be distributed across demographic groups and across groups at three different levels of poverty: those at the poverty level; those in deep poverty; and
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From page 23... ...
However, with children's development in mind, the goal of child poverty reduction alone, whether in the short or long term, is limiting because it focuses all our attention on family resources and ignores other important factors in healthy development. An alternative goal to poverty reduction might be to promote children's human capital, conceived broadly to include cognitive and noncognitive capacities as well as physical and mental health, both during childhood and into the adult years.
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From page 24... ...
With that in mind, the committee's review of the poverty literature in Chapter 3 includes evidence on programs that both reduce child poverty and promote children's health development. HOW THE COMMITTEE SELECTED PROGRAMS TO REVIEW The heart of the committee's charge is to "identify policies and programs with the potential to help reduce child poverty and deep poverty .
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From page 25... ...
To generate estimates of poverty reduction from the committee's program and policy ideas, it commissioned research from the Urban Institute's Transfer Income Model, Version 3 (TRIM3) micro simulation model.5 Second, with a target of reducing child poverty by one-half within 10 years, an obvious guiding criterion was the magnitude of the reduction in overall child poverty.
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From page 26... ...
CONSIDERATIONS IN ESTIMATING POLICY AND PROGRAM IMPACTS At first glance, estimating poverty reductions for any given program may appear to be a straightforward calculation. If Program A provides, say, $5 billion in additional benefits to families with children, why not just conduct a simulation in which the incomes of recipient families are increased by the value of the added benefits and then determine how many families
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From page 27... ...
Expansions of the Medicaid medical insurance program are another example. The committee's literature review in Chapter 3 suggests that health insurance programs can improve child health, but estimating short-run impacts of program expansion on poverty reduction is complicated by the various ways poverty measures handle health care benefits and expenditures.
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From page 28... ...
For the programs featured in Chapters 5 and 6, it is p important to understand that committee consensus on their inclusion was based solely on the strength of the evidence base supporting them and not on individual committee members' endorsements of the policies themselves. ORGANIZATION OF THE REPORT The report proper begins in Chapter 2 with a demographic portrait of child poverty in the United States.
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From page 29... ...
As directed by the statement of task, the committee provides a separate look at poverty lines drawn to distinguish deep poverty (defined as below 50% of the SPM poverty line) , conventional poverty (as defined by the SPM)
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Appendix E includes the TRIM3 summary tables, and Appendix F contains the Urban Institute TRIM3 technical specifications. Finally, a note on the overall organization of this report: As with all consensus reports produced by the National Academies, we provide evidence supporting all of our conclusions and recommendations.
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From page 31... ...
INTRODUCTION 31 Isaacs, J.B., Lou, C., Hahn, H., Hong, A., Quakenbush, C., and Steuerle, C.E.
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