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Title: Reviewing A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2020
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Abstract: To reduce poverty and improve family well-being, the 20th century saw the creation and expansion of scores of federal programs offering assistance to low-income families with children. Major programs included Aid to Dependent Children (created in 1935, later known as AFDC and now Temporary Assistance for Needy Families or TANF), the Social Security survivor insurance program (1939), Food Stamps (1964, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP), Medicaid (1965), rental assistance (1965), Supplemental Security Income (1972), the earned income tax credit (1975), the child tax credit (1997), and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (1997). These and dozens of other programs provide an array of cash, food, housing, health, and other benefits designed to assist families, including those with children, with material and other needs.1 Drawing on data from the Urban Institute, the Roadmap displays annual federal expenditures on children between 1960 and 2017, in inflation-adjusted terms.2 Figure 4-5 in the Roadmap shows that spending grew from $60.5 billion in 1960 to $516.4 billion in 2010, before moderating to $481.5 billion by 2017 “largely due to the decrease in transfers during the economic recovery that followed the Great Recession.” The Roadmap finds that “the eight-fold growth in real spending between 1960 and 2010 is striking, and it is many times larger than the 15-percent increase in the number of children in the population.”3 Table D4-1 breaks out federal expenditures on children by program for selected years between 1960 and 2017, in constant dollars. It shows how real spending almost universally grew in those programs between those years, including because most current programs didn’t exist in 1960.4 State spending adds to that federal spending on children.
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Authors: Weidinger, Matt
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Data Collections: IPUMS CPS
Topics: Population Health and Health Systems, Poverty and Welfare
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