July 21, 2015
This one needs a really big “oy.” The lead headline of the Huffington Post tells readers that “child poverty higher now than great recession.” This is based on an AP story headlined “more U.S. children are living in poverty than during the great recession.” This article is in turn based on the annual Kids Count Data Book that is produced by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
It turns out that this is not quite the story as the second paragraph of the article indicates:
“Twenty-two percent of American children were living in poverty in 2013 compared with 18 percent in 2008, according to the latest Kids Count Data Book, with poverty rates nearly double among African-Americans and American Indians and problems most severe in South and Southwest.”
Note the comparison is with 2008, the beginning of the recession, not the trough of the recession in 2010. By any measure the recovery from this recession has been slow and weak. (It is hard to recover from recessions caused by bursting asset bubbles.)
Almost eight years after its onset we would still need another three million jobs to restore the prime age employment rate to its pre-crisis level. And median wages are still below their pre-crisis level. But the child poverty rate is at least moving in the right direction in the recovery, even if way too slowly. And even the pre-recession level was ridiculously high. Anyhow, the real story is bad enough, it’s not necessary to exaggerate.
Comments