It’s Easy to Dramatically Cut Poverty. US Policymakers Just Don’t Want To.
Children, the elderly, disabled people, and students continue to make up the vast majority of the US poor. We could easily slash poverty by increasing the generosity and reach of benefit programs for the nonworking population — but lawmakers refuse to do so.
The expiration of the one-year pandemic-era Child Tax Credit and the lack of one-off stimulus payments resulted in child poverty being much higher in 2022 than 2021.(Maansi Srivastava for the Washington Post via Getty Images)
The Census released the Annual Social and Economic Supplement of the Current Population Survey (CPS-ASEC) earlier this month. The CPS-ASEC provides the most widely cited information about income, poverty, and health insurance in the United States.
The headline from the report is that the expiration of the one-year pandemic-era Child Tax Credit and the lack of one-off stimulus payments resulted in child poverty being much higher in 2022 than 2021. This headline is certainly true, though some of the specific numbers involved may not be totally accurate because the CPS-ASEC does a poor job of accurately estimating the uptake of tax credit benefits.
Nonetheless, below, I use the microdata files that the Census puts out to produce some figures about who made up the poor in 2021 and 2022.
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