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David is an occasional blogger, software engineer, Nintendo fanboy, liberal, news magazine addict, voracious TiVo user, and bibliophile. He was born in St. Louis, grew up in southern Indiana, and returned to St. Louis to attend Washington University. He hasn't managed to escape yet. He's a fan of free wine tastings, too many tv shows to name, and eating out. David makes his living developing web applications used internally by his employer. He doesn't blog about work because he's heard too many stories about that causing workplace troubles. There's more on the about page. |
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16 November 2004 - 3:32 pm
I was reading Slate's discussion about welfare reform when one of the contributors offered up the following passage describing all of the help the government gives the very poor.
We now supplement the earnings of low-income workers through several major programs:1) about $32 billion in cash, delivered through the tax code in a program called the Earned Income Tax Credit;
2) well over $20 billion in day-care and preschool education programs (including Head Start) that provide care while parents work and often aim to promote child development;
3) many billions of dollars in food and nutrition-assistance programs for both adults and children; and
4) a huge and rapidly growing Medicaid program, supplemented by an additional health-care program, which pays the medical bills of all children in poor families and many additional children living in families above the poverty level but with incomes under 200 percent of poverty (about $38,000 for a family of four in 2004).
In addition, many of these families receive support through various transportation programs, two additional tax credits, several housing programs, and a blizzard of education and training programs. Most of these programs have been expanded or created since the late 1980s. I mention this extensive list of programs both because they demonstrate the nation's substantial commitment to helping poor and low-income families that work and because they provide essential context for considering the question of how much more taxpayers should be expected to spend on these families.
This is a perfect example of citing statistics that don't actually tell you anything; nothing is gained by knowing how much the government spends on low-income workers. You have to evaluate these policies at the other end of the spectrum: are families getting enough? For example, in 2003 about 35.8 million people were classified as living below the poverty line. This means that the $32 billion in cash discussed above comes out to $894 per person. This can easily be a large percentage of a poor person's income, but it hardly makes a dent in helping provide for the essentials such as food, shelter, child care, or health insurance. For example, if you pay a baby-sitter or other caregiver $50 a week to look after your children, you'd have to pay him about three times the amount you get through the Earned Income Tax Credit. And the $20 billion spent on "day-care and preschool education programs" is well intended but totally inadequate to the amount of child care needed by the nation's poor.
(One of the other slate commentators also made this point, but I'd like to remind everyone that the benefits mentioned in the excerpt seem to fall well short of the approximately $89 billion tax break that the Bush Administration gave to the wealthiest one percent of Americans.)
So the next time you hear numbers like this remember that they don't actually mean anything. Whoever is quoting them is trying to awe you with really large numbers to keep you from realizing that "really large" means "not nearly large enough."
Posted by on 16 November 2004 at 3:32 PM
Comments
Great observations David. Also it's not clear that a buck spent by the government reaches any recipient as a buck.
Posted by rkc on 17 November 2004 - 9:13 PM