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America is substantially reducing poverty among children

economist.com

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Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#11

Post by stevenpetryk »

flimflamm wrote: post #5

How can children be poor? Aren't their parents poor? Or are children supposed to provide for them selves in US?

Consider this: the intention is quite obvious, and the gravity of the situation makes pedantry like this come across as completely tone-deaf.

Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#12

Post by NineStarPoint »

flimflamm wrote: post #5

How can children be poor? Aren't their parents poor? Or are children supposed to provide for them selves in US?

The phrase isn’t “children who are poor”, it’s “children living in poverty.” Which yes primarily counts children living with poor parents, but could also count runaway children, children living as wards of the state in bad conditions, etc. Either way, it’s defined as children in living conditions that don’t have enough resources to meet a minimal acceptable standard.

Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#14

Post by munk-a »

flimflamm wrote: post #5

How can children be poor? Aren't their parents poor? Or are children supposed to provide for them selves in US?

Dependents can certainly live in poverty - that does almost always indicate that the family unit as a whole lives in poverty but it does allow some differentiation for families that are struggling with debt but manage to provide a relatively poverty free childhood for their offspring.

Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#15

Post by ajsnigrutin »

munk-a wrote: post #9

I think this (COVID relief) is the closest America is going to get to a legitimate domestic experiment on UBI we're going to get for a while so it's rather heartening to see the drop in family poverty.

Nah, it's not.

Monthly lottery winners are.

If you know that 'free money' is just a temporary thing, you don't quit your job and move somewhere where that amount of money is enough to survive, and just stop working.... if ubi is permanent, and guaranteed to be "enough" to minimalistically survive, many more people would do that.

Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#16

Post by munk-a »

m_ke wrote: post #10
dang wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't take HN threads into partisan flamewar. It's the opposite of what we're trying for on this site. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's not partisan, the child tax credit that gives parents $300/month/child that was included in the "American Rescue Plan" expires at the end of the year. [1] The new infrastructure bill was supposed to include free childcare and other benefits but it's looking like it will get killed by Manchin and Sinema. [1] "The American Rescue Plan allows families to opt in to receive the monthly payments from July 15 until Dec…

I feel like the wording in your original post was particularly poor though - instead of focusing in on those two as individuals you attributed the issue to democrats as a whole - and also omitted that the bill would also pass quite easily if, say, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz decided to vote for it. You mentioned that it passed due to the previous administration (a republican administration) and was now in danger (under a democratic administration) due to corrupt democrats. It's a guideline on HN to always read things as charitably as possible but the wording here was really really poor and could easily be read as a proposition that the democrats were torpedoing something championed by republicans. Additionally - specifically pulling political parties into the discussion will always make the discourse degrade.

Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#17

Post by notJim »

Note that many of the administrative hurdles could be overcome by moving the benefit to the Social Security Administration, who already have the data needed. Also, it's been a while since I looked at this, but Republican Mitt Romney had the best proposal out of all the child benefit proposals that were kicking around earlier this year. That the democrats didn't pick up on it is a sad statement about them.

https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2021/02/15/who-should-a...

Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#18

Post by spywaregorilla »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #15
munk-a wrote: post #9

I think this (COVID relief) is the closest America is going to get to a legitimate domestic experiment on UBI we're going to get for a while so it's rather heartening to see the drop in family poverty.

Nah, it's not. Monthly lottery winners are. If you know that 'free money' is just a temporary thing, you don't quit your job and move somewhere where that amount of money is enough to survive, and just stop working.... if ubi is permanent, and guaranteed to be "enough" to minimalistically survive, many more people would do that.

If a noteworthy number of people decided they were going to not work, the cost of labor would rise, and prices would rise until those people needed to work again.

Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#19

Post by droopyEyelids »

flimflamm wrote: post #5

How can children be poor? Aren't their parents poor? Or are children supposed to provide for them selves in US?

You're getting downvoted for the joke, but in a way, yes everyone in the USA is supposed to provide for themselves.

Aside from a few demeaning and complicated government programs, the USA has only distributed resources through factor payments based on labor, or ownership of capital. Most of our programs aiming to help the poor only phase in after the poor have earned a certain amount of money through labor.

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