New York Times on falling child poverty rates, including in rural America

Jason DeParle reported earlier this week for the New York Times on recent drops in child poverty, due largely to the government safety net, in particular SNAP (formerly food stamps) and tax credits (including the Earned Income Tax Credit or EITC).  DeParle reports from three locales, depicting three racial groups. The first, which I'll focus on here because it is the most rural, is a white family in Marlinton, West Virginia, population 1405, in the eastern, Appalachian, coal-producing part of the state.  What follows gives the big picture on the drop in child poverty:

A comprehensive new analysis shows that child poverty has fallen 59 percent since 1993, with need receding on nearly every front. Child poverty has fallen in every state, and it has fallen by about the same degree among children who are white, Black, Hispanic and Asian, living with one parent or two, and in native or immigrant households. Deep poverty, a form of especially severe deprivation, has fallen nearly as much.

In 1993, nearly 28 percent of children were poor, meaning their households lacked the income the government deemed necessary to meet basic needs. By 2019, before temporary pandemic aid drove it even lower, child poverty had fallen to about 11 percent.

And here's part of the vignette out of Marlinton, WV:  

To see how the safety net protects children, consider the experience of Stacy Tallman, a mother of three in Marlinton, W.Va., who was working as a waitress last year when her teenage son, Jakob, suffered serious injuries in a car accident. Both Ms. Tallman and her partner, who has a maintenance job, missed work to care for him, and their income fell by about a quarter to $36,000.

After payroll taxes and other expenses the government takes into account when measuring poverty, their income was just below the poverty line. But the safety net delivered more than $16,000, not counting pandemic assistance. That included $8,000 in refundable tax credits and $6,500 from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps.

Instead of falling into poverty, the family survived the crisis about 50 percent above the poverty threshold.

“I don’t know where I’d be right now if I didn’t have that help,” Ms. Tallman said.

Medicaid paid for Jakob’s care and saved the family from bankrupting medical bills. SNAP, the food subsidy, eased Ms. Tallman’s anxiety about the children going hungry, as did free school meals. Tax credits helped her complete a longstanding plan to buy the family’s first house.

A year after the accident, Jakob became the first in the family to earn a high school degree.

 

In addition, DeParle wrote a few days later from Huntington, West Virginia, which is metropolitan but probably qualifies as rural in the national imaginary (as, indeed, does all of WV).  The story is about how recent safety net programs are chipping away at intergenerational poverty.  It is headlined, "How Poverty Programs Aided Children from One Generation to the Next," and the excerpt that follows speaks to place, as well as time/history: 

Cornbread, beans and potatoes.

When Ms. Jackson describes the challenges of growing up poor, she starts with location. “I grew up in a cemetery,” she said. Her father owned a trailer in rural Ohio with a graveyard on three sides. “I played beside the graves.”

Though money was short even when her father worked, his injury increased the hardship and left him angry and depressed. Her mother stretched food stamps with a bare-budget meal that remains in Ms. Jackson’s repertoire: cornbread, beans and potatoes.

The opioid epidemic that raced across the Ohio Valley wreaked havoc with some of her older siblings. As nieces and nephews took refuge in the trailer, Ms. Jackson spent much of her childhood helping to care for them.

By the time she reached high school, her family had moved across the Ohio River to Huntington, and Ms. Jackson was essentially raising a sister’s toddler. She already felt hopelessly behind in school when she discovered she was pregnant. She gave birth her senior year and dropped out, with more worries than plans and little help from the baby’s father.

As a poor single mother in 2012, Ms. Jackson turned to a welfare system that had undergone profound changes in her short lifetime. There was more help for parents who worked but less for those who did not, with time limits and work requirements on cash aid.

Both of these DeParle stories are well worth a read in their entirety.  He has long reported on poverty for the New York Times.

Here is NPR's coverage of this good news on the child poverty front.