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| Re: Hillary's Candid View of the Electorate (202349) | |||
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Re: Hillary's Candid View of the Electorate |
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Posted by salaamallah@hotmail.com on Sun Mar 18 09:14:30 2007, in response to Re: Hillary's Candid View of the Electorate, posted by Train Dude on Sun Mar 18 01:06:00 2007. EARLY 16 million Americans are living in severe poverty, theMcClatchy Washington Bureau reported recently. These are individuals making less than $5,080 a year and families of four bringing in less than $9,903 a year, hardly imaginable in this day and age. That number has been growing rapidly since 2000. And, as a percentage, those living in severe poverty has reached a 32-year high. Even more troubling, the report noted that in any given month only 10 percent of the severe poor received Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and only 36 percent received food stamps. Clearly, those numbers reveal issues that policymakers need to address. Without some assistance, those in most severe poverty tend to fall into all sorts of other difficulties, such as health and housing problems, which lead to children's education problems, which lead to even deeper poverty, which perpetuates the cycle. But there's another issue. We can't address problems unless we know about them. That means we need good data that point us to problems. We only know about the troublingly high poverty rates and low assistance participation rates because the U.S. Census Bureau has a "Survey of Income and Program Participation." For the last quarter-century, the Census Bureau has done personal interviews of American families, following them over a number of years and tracking family resources (cash and noncash) and participation in various government programs (such as Social Security, food stamps, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, school lunches and unemployment insurance). Obviously, such information is useful. Yet the Bush administration budget for 2007 eliminated the survey. The Census Bureau was asked to come up with $40 million in budget savings, so the Survey of Income and Program Participation took the hit. But after protests from states, counties, economists and researchers, Congress restored funding. So we come to the president's 2008 budget. It, too, eliminates the survey. This is counterproductive, even in an era of scarce resources. This is the only large-scale survey that analyzes the before-and-after effects of policy changes on individual families over time. It helps policymakers and researchers determine what triggering factors get people to go on and off government programs. The National Academy of Sciences panel, "Measuring Poverty," recommended that the Survey of Income and Program Participation should become the basis of official U.S. income and poverty statistics. If we lose the Survey of Income and Program Participation, we lose a quarter-century investment in high-quality data on the effectiveness of government programs, such as welfare reform. Policymakers and researchers need good data to show what works and what doesn't as they craft new policies and fix old ones. Congress will have to restore funding for the survey again. Sacramento Bee |
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