The centerpiece of Child Trends report is the claim that child poverty declined dramatically over the past few decades. The chart summarizing this looks like this development looks like this.
When I saw this chart earlier this week, it looked very strange.
The decline in the 1990s made sense as the employment rate and the EITC increased a lot in the 1990s (the EITC’s effect is massively overstated by shoddy data, but that’s not relevant here). The stagnation from 2000 to 2013 made sense. We had two recessions and employment dropped considerably. The slight decline in the mid-2010s also made sense as employment was starting to pick up again.
But the sharp drop in 2018 and 2019 was hard to understand. The labor market improved some but no more than in prior years.
Nothing that happened in the economy in 2018 can explain this data. But something that happened at the Census can. In the mid-2010s, “the Census Bureau introduced redesigned income questions, followed by changes beginning in 2015 to allow spouses and unmarried partners to specifically identify as opposite- or same-sex.” These redesigned questions were studied for a few years, but they did not make it into the data series published by the Census until 2018, which is when these otherwise inexplicable income spikes occurred.
In 2018, the Census income and poverty data had what is called a “series break.” The underlying methods changed, making 2018 and 2019 incomparable with the prior years. We can’t say for sure what impact this series break had because we do not have a 2018 and 2019 data set that uses the old methods. But anyone with a lick of sense can see these graphs above and realize that there is no way they reflect dramatic real-life changes rather than survey methodology changes. Trump was not juicing the incomes of the super-poor. It just wasn’t happening.
A tiny CTC expansion that entirely excludes families with earnings below $2,500 while only increasing CTC benefits by, at most, $75 for any family earning less than $9,167 did not cause the per-capita income of the 2nd percentile child to increase by $977 in a single year. For the smallest family with a kid — a two-person family — that’d be a jump of nearly $2,000. Anyone who thinks this actually happened at the same time that the Census changed its income and family relations methodology needs their head examined.
If you remove this obviously bullshit statistical blip from the report, there is basically no child poverty decline at all after the year 2000.
Everybody in my immediate and extended family is below average height and none of us seems to care. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a short person seriously complain about being short. The rest of you seem to think is means a lot more to us than it does.
I’m pretty embarrassed by how long I paid any attention at all to either Bruenig or Matt the master fucking shiposter Yglesias. All just a troll game for these assholes it’s repugnant.
There are plenty of maladjusted toxic fragile male egos around. If you blend that with someone being short and you get people willing to break their own femurs to try to make themselves stop hating themselves.
Sometime’s it’s easy to forget what conditions billions of people live in across the world. I need to do a better job of keeping perspective of what others out there go through.
Conversely, I was “the tall kid” growing up, and it sucked. I was like a foot taller than everyone until high school and I hated being so different. Believe me, the ladies were not beating a path to my door because of my height, or anything else.
Buying shoes can also suck when you’re a wee dude like me. My feet are size 6, I have very limited selection. It’s easy to get dress shoes but everything else is a pain. All my sneakers are women’s shoes. OH NO MY FRAGILE MALE EGO!
Maybe it’s less of a thing in America but dating profiles almost always mention a minimum height in Europe, especially in Central/Eastern Europe. And they all want 6+ feet tall
Shorter, smaller people use less resources and are better for the environment. People who are interested in procreating should search for shorter matches of they care about the planet.
I never have a big problem with shoes but clothes shopping gets difficult if you’re tall, planes suck unless you get an exit row or first class, fitting in cars can be problematic
