This article looked fishy to me, so I looked into the papers it cited in the food insufficiency section. Turns out that, as always, journalists cannot be trusted to accurately summarize a paper, nor can one expect readers to bother checking it.
1) 25% reduction is a relative number.
> There was a 3.7–percentage point reduction (95% CI, –0.055 to –0.019 percentage points; P For ~3 percent to be a 25% relative reduction, the starting value is about 12% households with food insufficiency.
2) What are the patterns of insufficiency rates historically?
> Households with children were most affected—food insufficiency in households with children peaked at 18% in December 2020 and remained at 14% through June 2021, compared with approximately 3% among all households during 2019.
I'd guess the pandemic (esp. lockdowns) did the most harm here. Note that the payments started in July 2021 (per the paper), so the fluctuations in rates of insufficiency in the period before are higher than the estimated CTC-caused reduction.
3) Disparities are because of racism?
> Structural racism has shaped disparities in food insufficiency, with children in Black non-Hispanic (19.2%) and Hispanic (22.0%) households experiencing food insufficiency at almost triple the rate of children in White non-Hispanic households (7.0%) as of June 2021.
Asians? What Asians? We're talking about structural racism here! They don't count because they usually screw up the narrative.
4) What is child food insufficiency?
> The outcome was household food insufficiency, based on the survey item “Getting enough food can also be a problem for some people. In the last 7 days, which of these statements best describes the food eaten in your household?” We coded our outcome as 1 if respondents reported sometimes or often “not [having] enough food to eat” in the last 7 days, and 0 otherwise (“enough of the kinds of food [I/we] wanted to eat,” and “enough, but not always the kinds of food [I/we] wanted to eat”). This coding is the same as others using the Household Pulse Survey data in recent studies during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Thankfully, it's more focused than the catch-all of "food insecurity."
Hypothesis: News and fear over the next pandemic wave causes people to stock up. This causes temporary shortages. Then, when asked if they had been unable to buy what they need, people say "yes."
*Important*: this pertains to the food insufficiency paper --- I didn't look into the child poverty reduction paper.
Regarding the child poverty reduction, I also would be interested in comparisons of child poverty rates and fluctuations re. the CTC. My cynical self views it like this:
1. There is a distribution of income.
2. One threshold in that distribution is called the poverty line.
3. Give people money, and it shifts the mean of the distribution. The integral between the threshold and (threshold - stimulus) on the curve is the people 'lifted out of poverty.'
Seems like a shell game to me. Less so than the EITC, though. It's not that people through the CTC are now able to climb the ladder to job and economic security and achieve the American dream (TM). My sense is that they are still treading water, albeit at a different level, all while the credentialed class congratulates itself over its magnanimity.
If anyone has papers (peer-reviewed papers, not journalists' hot takes), I'd like to read them. Thanks.