Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
7 Figures: National Academies report on child poverty
7 Figures: National Academies report on child poverty
Jan 25, 2026 1:33 AM

In a massive new599-page study, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s Board on Children, Youth, and Families produced a report on the costs of child poverty in the United States and the effectiveness of current efforts aimed at reducing poverty.

Here are seven figures from the report you should know:

1. In 2015, the latest year for which estimates were available, more than 9.6 million U.S. children (13.0 per cent) lived in families with annual es below a poverty line defined by the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM). About 2.1 million children (2.9 per cent) lived in “deep poverty,” defined as having family resources below half of the poverty-based line.

2. Child poverty rates were much higher for Black children (18 percent) and Hispanic children (22 percent) than for non-Hispanic White children (8 percent); for children in single-parent families (22 percent) than for those in two-parent families (9 percent); for children in immigrant families (21 percent) than for those in non-immigrant families (10 percent); and for children in families with no workers (62 percent) than for those in families with part-time workers (28 percent) or with full-time workers (7 percent).

3. The two refundable tax credits—the EITC and the refundable portion of the Child Tax Credit—are the most successful at alleviating poverty. The report estimates that the elimination of these tax credits would raise SPM child poverty to 18.9 percent, an increase of 5.9 percentage points or 4.4 million children. In the absence of SNAP benefits, the child poverty rate would have increased to 18.2 percent.

4. During the 1967–2016 period, child poverty rates varied with both business cycles and changes in social benefit programs. Government tax and transfer programs reduced child poverty modestly between 1967 and 1993, but they became increasingly important after 1993 because of increases in government benefits (mainly the Earned e Tax Credit) targeted at the poor and near-poor. Between 1993 and 2016, SPM poverty fell by 12.3 percentage points, dropping from 27.9 to 15.6 percent.

5. The decline in two-parent family structure is the single biggest factor associated with the increase in child (official) poverty between the mid-1970s and the early 1990s. However, child poverty has fallen since the early 1990s, despite continuing increases in single parenthood. This more recent decline in child poverty is most strongly associated with increases in maternal employment.

6. Men who grew up in poverty are twice as likely as adults to have been arrested, and among women early childhood poverty was associated with a six-fold increase in the likelihood of bearing a child out of wedlock prior to age 21.

7. Programs producing the largest reductions in child poverty are estimated to cost the most. Almost all of mittee-developed program options that lead to substantial poverty reduction were estimated to cost at least $20 billion annually.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
‘A Flight From Human Intimacy’
Japan is a nation going under, demographically speaking. It is estimated that Japan will lose 10 million people in population over the next ten years. Like many nations, Japan is not having babies fast enough to keep its population stable. One reason: what the Japanese are calling “sekkusu shinai shokogun, or ‘celibacy syndrome.'” Young people don’t want to date, be intimate, get married, have sex. There are pelling reasons for this. The first is the Japanese culture’s saturation in social...
How Conservatives Can Become Storytellers
“The plural of anecdote is not data”, claimed toxicologist Frank Kotsonis, in an attempt to correct sloppy thinking. While Kotsonis has provided a useful aphorism, it can obscure the equally interesting fact that the singular of data is anecdote. Consider, for example, the following two stories. The first is the shortest work of fiction ever written by Ernest Hemingway: For sale: baby shoes, never worn. This powerful story is a marvel of economy. In a mere six words and three...
DeMint on Changing Washington’s Political Culture
There’s a fascinating profile of Jim DeMint, the new president of the Heritage Foundation, in BusinessWeek, which makes a good pairing for this NYT piece that focuses on the GOP’s “civil war” between establishment Republicans and Tea Partiers. But one of ments that really stuck out to me concerning DeMint’s move from the Senate to a think tank was his realization about what it would take to change the political culture in Washington. As Joshua Green writes, DeMint had previously...
Entrepreneurs, the Working Class, and the Mosaic of Culture
In an essay for AEI’s The American, Henry Olsen does a deep dive on the white working class, a group that Republicans have won by significant margins in recent years. (HT) Yet upon reviewing evidence in a new book by Andrew Levison, The White Working Class Today: Who They Are, How They Think, and How Progressives Can Regain Their Support, Olsen concludes that “conservatives, not progressives, are the ones in need of an electoral strategy to capture this key segment...
Stan Druckenmiller on Intergenerational Theft
In a recent interview in the Wall Street Journal, billionaire Stan Druckenmiller discusses his recent university tour sounding the alarm on intergenerational theft. The article paraphrases his case: [W]hile today’s 65-year-olds will receive on average net lifetime benefits of $327,400, children born now will suffer net lifetime losses of $420,600 as they struggle to pay the bills of aging Americans. It goes on: When the former money manager visited Stanford University, the audience included older folks as well as students....
The Evangelical Work Ethic
Forget Max Weber and his Protestant work ethic, says Greg Forster. We don’t need social science to know that God cares about our work: Nothing shows the difficulty of understanding the relationship between work and faith more than our continued insistence on framing this issue as a debate over Max Weber’s long-discredited theory of the Protestant work ethic. Weber argued that Protestants value work because they think prosperity is proof that you’re saved; as anyone who knows anything about church...
License For Evil
No, that’s not the name of a new James Bond movie. Rather, it’s a Public Discourse post by Anthony Esolen that discusses society’s ability (and disability) to get a handle on evil actions and morality. The cry, “You can’t legislate morality” is, of course, false. That is exactly what law does, as Esolen points out. All laws bear some relation, however distant, to a moral evaluation of good and bad. We cannot escape making moral distinctions. One man’s theft is...
Fleeing France’s Failing Economy
For those of us on this side of the pond, France conjures up images of baguettes, beautiful women and lush countryside. For the French, the image conjured up might be taxes, taxes and more taxes. More than 70 per cent of the French feel taxes are “excessive”, and 80 per cent believe the president’s economic policy is “misguided” and “inefficient”. This goes far beyond the tax exiles such as Gérard Depardieu, members of the Peugeot family or Chanel’s owners. Worse,...
Human Trafficking Enters A New Marketplace: Organ Harvesting
There have been whispers of it before, but now it has been confirmed: trafficking humans in order to harvest organs. The Telegraph is reporting that an underage Somali girl was smuggled into Britain with the intent of harvesting her organs for those desperately waiting for transplants. Child protection charities warned last night that criminal gangs were attempting to exploit the demand for organ transplants in Britain. Bharti Patel, the chief executive of Ecpat UK, the child protection charity, said: “Traffickers...
Oliver O’Donovan in Conversation
Earlier this month, Christian’s Library Press co-sponsored a discussion between Ken Myers, Matthew Lee Anderson, and British moral philosopher Oliver O’Donovan. Held a few blocks from the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., the conversation addressed questions and themes of political theology and was loosely centered around O’Donovan’s 1996 book The Desire of the Nations. Click here to listen to an audio of the conversation on the website of Mars Hill Audio Journal. ...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2026 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved