Lies, Damn Lies, and Data Lies: A Homeless Epidemic Among College Students?

June 30, 2017

Imagine lying on a friend’s couch in her studio apartment, using the light from your cell phone to study for your midterm exam in small-business entrepreneurship. It’s late but you’re just now getting around to hitting the books because you’ve been out all day preparing for a contest, the winner of which is going to take home a $1,000 scholarship, which you can use to enroll in more community college classes next semester.

You’re hungry because you couldn’t afford to eat today since shampoo, bus fare, and books, were more important purchases. The welfare benefits you receive each month just can’t cover all the costs. You’ve been living on your friend’s couch off and on because you keep fighting with your parents over chores and how late you can stay out now that you’ve turned the legal age at 18. Sometimes you stay at a friend’s, other times you find an abandoned building or a van to crash in.

Now imagine this happens to 46,000 students in one community college school district alone. Imagine nearly 150,000 community college-age kids in one district going hungry on a regular basis because they don’t have enough money for food.

Hard to believe, right? It is hard to believe. But that’s what a new study in the Los Angeles Community College School District found.

The advocacy group Wisconsin HOPE Lab, based in Washington, D.C., does research “aimed at improving equitable outcomes in postsecondary education.” The study it produced — and reported by The Los Angeles Times — was commissioned by the school district’s board of trustees after the county Board of Supervisors decided it would spend a newly approved sales tax on homeless services, and in particular, on homeless college students. The tax is alleged to be worth $3.55 billion over 10 years.

As LaCorte News reports, the sampling of students in the Los Angeles Community College School District wasn’t in fact scientific. The lab emailed thousands of students, asking them to fill out a survey online. Less than 5 percent responded. The authors acknowledged in their report that “the findings in this study are limited by low response rates and potentially non-random sampling. Students experiencing food and housing insecurity may have been more likely to respond to the survey.”

As the email-only news agency notes, “Polls created by organizations with a mission, unsurprisingly, nearly always end up with poll results supporting that mission. This was one.”

You can’t really blame the school district for wanting to get in on the cash windfall, it’s animal instinct for large organizations to do so. But data lies are easy to generate, and have become a major challenge for policymakers trying to figure how much money to raise and where to spend it.

The problem is so large that Congress has created a commission to study it. And Robert Doar, who served as both commissioner of social services for the state of New York and commissioner of the New York City Human Resources Administration, says the issue isn’t so much that the information doesn’t exist, but rather it’s not being shared “in any organized, comprehensive or effective way.”

This failure is especially true between the federal government and state and local agencies. The Feds are relying on Census Bureau data to determine the levels of welfare and food stamps each year, but the Census data are becoming “increasingly inaccurate” and not reflective of “the true condition of America’s low-income populations.”

Throughout my 20 years of working in the social services agencies of New York State and New York City, I was constantly aware that I had a clearer picture of what was going on in low-income households than what was being reported in the Census Bureau’s annual reports on the economic condition of Americans, including those living in my state. Using data systems common in every state, I could see who was receiving food stamps or other welfare benefits, in what neighborhoods, and in what types of families. I knew the education levels of recipients, their family structures, and employment statuses. In short, I knew how much assistance New Yorkers were receiving from various government programs.

Especially troubling was the fact that the Census Bureau was indicating greater economic distress than what my colleagues and I knew was really the case.

Doar says a new report shows why the quality of data is on the decline.

Households have simply become less inclined to respond to surveys; and when they do, they are less likely to answer certain questions and provide accurate information, particularly when they are being asked about receiving various forms of public assistance. …

(The study’s) coauthors revealed significant underreporting of receipt rates and the value of benefit received for most poverty-reducing programs. For example, surveys failed to capture almost half of the dollars given out by the Temporary Aid to Needy Families program.

He notes that underreporting makes the problem look much more severe than it is.

If the closer to the ground you get, the more reliable data become, then it would seem that sharing the data would be a helpful solution, but of course, in a world of regulatory paralysis, there needs to be some kind of “legal authority or established incentives for state agencies to share their datasets with the Census Bureau.”

If agencies did share their data, Doar predicts that “it would dramatically improve the ability of the Census Bureau to describe the real economic condition of Americans.”

Such a measure would allow for a much-needed correction in how we understand poverty and perceive government programs in the country, ultimately contributing to more targeted and more effective policy decisions. …

Such data sharing could have far reaching impact on federal policy by allowing us to know the actual value of the benefits we provide, and how effective these programs are in moving families toward self-sufficiency. There is no more important fact to know in the War on Poverty.

Read the full Doar article in Real Clear Policy.

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A Safety Net That Works: Enforcing Child Support Payments

March 17, 2017

What parent doesn’t want to help his or her child? Most people would wonder why the question even needs to be asked. But while child neglect and child poverty are issues that the social safety net and public assistance rightfully focus on addressing, legislative efforts to require delinquent or absent parents to take financial responsibility prove a handy tool for reducing the problem of childhood poverty.

Child Support Enforcement (CSE) was first passed into federal law in 1974. It was set up to make parents become financially responsible for their children. At the time, 75 percent of welfare caseloads involved an absent parent.

CSE became a part of the social services network in order to take pressure off government services and return the job of parenting to where it belonged — the parent.  Yet nonpayment of child support remains a huge problem today, even after the 1996 welfare reform law strongly enhanced enforcement mechanisms.

Child Support Enforcement is an issue that crosses partisan lines. Separation and divorce are an unfortunate circumstance of modern life, and child support delinquencies are not confined to one particular income level or political belief. At the same time, CSE was a major factor in reducing poverty among children after the 1996 welfare reform law was signed.

Believe it or not, one quarter of the welfare reform law of 1996 was dedicated to CSE. Its impact was notable. Child support agreements among poor parents increased by 8 percentage points from 1993-2003, meaning more children were assured that the parent not living with them helped pay for their upbringing. Enforcing child support payments resulted in a 74 percent increase in payment collections over 10 years.

So what happened? In the second decade since the law was passed, the percentage of custodial parents with a payment agreement dropped by nearly 14 points.

What accounts for the loss of momentum? Robert Doar, the former commissioner of New York City’s Health and Human Services, explains.

What accounts for this loss of momentum is a legitimate, although exaggerated, concern about being too tough on poor noncustodial parents, the parent who is not living with the child. A false wisdom has emerged in the policy community—from academics to the media—that the child support system forces noncustodial dads to, as the headline of a 2015 New York Times story put it, “Skip Child Support. Go to Jail. Lose Job. Repeat.” Some influential commentators even see the system as fundamentally unjust by imposing on poor men burdens that are viewed as the government’s responsibility. …

Certainly, some poor noncustodial parents are struggling and need help to live up to their obligations. But most noncustodial parents, poor and nonpoor alike, are capable of working and could contribute something—even a regular payment of $25 per month has value. Analysts who are critical of the program seem to forget that the parent raising the child full time is often poor too. In 2013, for poor custodial parents who received child support payments, the noncustodial parent’s payments represented 49 percent of their income. Allowing parents to completely walk away from their financial responsibility to their children should not be an option.

According to Doar, if the share of poor custodial parents with agreements had held steady at the percentage that it was in 2003 when the welfare reform law was still being closely enforced, then 500,000 more poor custodial parents would have had orders to receive support in 2013!

“Surely a substantial fraction of these parents would have received enough in payments for them and their children to be lifted above the poverty line,” he wrote in the introduction to a recent volume he edited on the topic.

What Reasons Are There For Parents to Refuse to Pay Child Support?

A lot of times, the parent responsible for child support payments is cut off from the child. Other times, resentment of one parent toward the other leads to a child being caught in the middle. Still other times, suspicion that the money is being misused by the custodial parent is made as an excuse by noncustodial parents to withhold payments.

But sometimes, the paying parent claims he just can’t afford it. And while that claim may have been doubted or disproven, it sadly is becoming a more frequent excuse due to an unfortunate shift in American culture and economy — notably the increasing struggle of men in the labor market. More from Doar:

Reliable data on noncustodial parents are hard to come by because the Census Bureau’s major surveys do not ask whether a man living alone is also a nonresident father. But a survey from 1997 conducted by the Urban Institute found that only 43 percent of noninstitutionalized, nonresident fathers who were poor worked at all—and this was during the late 1990s economic boom. Another study from the Urban Institute used administrative data from nine states in 2003 and 2004 and found that 25 percent of all obligors had no reported income. …

I suspect, given the evidence on young, low-skilled men generally, that these rates must look even worse today. In 2000, among African American men age 16–24 without a high school diploma and not in school, the employment rate was 40.8 percent, and for similarly positioned whites, it was 72.3 percent. By 2007 (like 2000, a year at the peak of the business cycle), the rates had fallen dramatically to 28.7 and 55.0 percent, respectively.

Seven million men age 25 to 54 are not working or even looking for work, according to recent data. Many of them have children despite having never married. These men are disproportionately less educated, and seen by woman as less “marriageable.” Yet marriage is a reliable indicator of higher paying jobs.

With the increasing struggle of men in the labor market, sympathy has shifted. But there is something of a chicken-and-egg argument to all this. Where once women claimed they didn’t need men to raise their children, they still demanded that fathers (a majority of noncustodial parents) help out. Did women tell men to get lost because they were dead weight? Or did men become deadbeats because their paternal role was rejected?

Data show that 70 percent of arrears are owed by noncustodial parents who have no documented income or very little earnings (less than $10,000 a year). And 25 percent of poor custodial parents with a support agreement aren’t receiving payments. So whatever the relationship between parents, the question is now whether it is even possible to get blood from a stone?

Much can be done to fix the mish-mash of regulations and changes that have occurred over the last 40 years. For instance, determining what is a proper measure of a noncustodial parent’s income would go a long way to changing the way male parents look at work. Why is this? Because evaluating a parent’s ability to pay support based on an over-the-table paycheck disincentivizes men from going to work.

The reforms to the program in 1996 focused on tracking down and holding accountable “deadbeat” dads, but it did little to acknowledge or address those who really are dead broke. This is a difficult balance to strike—I know from my experience working in New York that many fathers who appear to have few assets and no earnings are working off-the-books or involved in illicit activities, but they are reluctant to make that known because they either do not want to pay or do not want the government to know of their off-the-books activities.

Another issue is the requirement to declare the other parent’s ability to pay support before qualifying for assistance. The purpose of the requirement is to ensure custodial parents look to the other parent to contribute before going to the government for help. This is the case with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the cash welfare program.

But TANF is on the decline while Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicaid, child care, and housing assistance programs are on the rise. And guess what? Those programs don’t require opening a child support case as a condition of receiving aid.

But the issue, Doar explains once more, isn’t necessarily a matter of what you have to reveal, but whether the revelation leads to some kind of change.

Policy should not have to choose between helping single mothers or low-income men. CSE is a rare government program (outside the criminal justice system) that interacts often with disconnected, low-skilled men, but it does not do enough to help them. Order amounts should be responsive to the noncustodial parent’s ability to pay and his changing economic circumstances, and significant improvements have been made on this front. But a singular focus on reducing order amounts and forgiving arrears distracts from the main challenge these men face: not enough of them are working. Instead of reducing what we expect of these men, we should help them better meet their obligations to their families and society.

Lastly, Doar notes that if federal or state assistance is dependent on parents working, then expand the programs that incentivize work.

While momentum has been building in Washington for an expansion of the earned income tax credit (EITC) for all childless adults, this policy is not well-targeted. A better solution is to expand the EITC for noncustodial parents who work and pay current child support. As commissioner in New York State, I created and implemented such a program, and an Urban Institute analysis found that it increased the share of parents who paid their support in full.

Why Is the Child Support Enforcement Program Important?

Historically, CSE has worked. Even as late as 2015, CSE resulted in $5.26 in payments for ever dollar spent on enforcement. Doar explains that enforcement works for several reasons:

  1. The program sends a clear message to all potential parents: if you play a role in bringing a child into the world, you have a responsibility to help support him or her.
  2. Strong child support enforcement not only communicates that essential American value, it changes the incentives around fathering children outside of marriage by making it impossible to abandon the responsibilities of parenthood.
  3. When child support obligations force an absent parent to be reminded of his financial responsibilities, he is also more likely to take up his other parental duties and be more involved in the child’s life. Unsurprisingly then, receiving child support is also linked to better outcomes for the children involved.
  4. Studies have found that formal child support payments are associated with fewer behavioral problems, better academic performance, and increased self-esteem.
  5. While it may seem counterintuitive, the CSE program offers one of policy’s best opportunities to address the crisis of prime-age male nonwork in America.

CSE is a needed and effective program. It currently lifts more than one million families above the government’s official poverty line, reduces single parenthood, and improves child outcomes, all by enforcing and facilitating personal responsibility at very low cost to taxpayers.

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The Poverty Debate: Why We Don’t Agree on The Same Set of Facts

September 5, 2016

The political realm is a great place to toil if you aspire to be an armchair pugilist. Without much personally at stake in the outcome of  the poverty debate, it is easy to pick a side and argue statistics and facts. But in the midst of all the fighting are real people being impacted by decisions outside of their control.

Such is the case when it comes to arguments between the political scientists of the left and right over welfare reform, and whether those at the bottom rungs are any better off despite numbers showing that millions of people were clearly lifted out of poverty as a result of the 1996 welfare reform law.

To this day, commentators on the left employ bogeyman language for the anti-poverty law — demonizing Newt Gingrich and House Republicans for coming up with legislation that Bill Clinton signed — while at the same time acknowledging that the percentage of people in poverty is demonstrably less than reflected in the antiquated methodology used to determine current poverty levels.

Take the words of Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute:

The official poverty rate is just above 15 percent, about a point larger than it was in 1996. But that measure is misleading, because it doesn’t take into account non-cash benefits and tax subsidies. According to Harvard University’s Christopher Jencks, the absolute poverty rate falls to under 5 percent when adjusted for food and housing, the earned income and children’s tax credit, and a more accurate measure of inflation.

Nonetheless, Jencks and other social policy researchers are concerned about the rise of “deep poverty” — an increase in the percentage of families whose income is less than 50 percent of the official poverty line.

Some liberal analysts blame welfare reform for gouging a huge hole in the social safety net. Even as unemployment soared during the Great Recession, they note, TANF caseloads stayed down. That meant fewer needy families were getting cash assistance when they needed it most.

That’s true, but it’s not the whole story. As cash assistance has shrunk, other forms of social support have grown and become more generous. These include unemployment insurance, food stamps (now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) and disability programs. In fact, some conservatives complain that welfare reform hasn’t made poor single-parent families less dependent on government; it just transferred their dependence to other programs that lack TANF’s strong work requirements.

Marshall notes that welfare reform, courtesy of President Clinton or otherwise, helped reduce the number of people in poverty. The big problem now is the number of women with children who live in “deep poverty,” which is defined as people living on less than half the official poverty rate. Professors Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer recently wrote a book in which they demonstrate that “deep poverty” rose by 2.6 percentage points between 1996 and 2011, from 1.7 to 4.3 percent.

At the same time, however, the Manhattan Institute has released a study contradicting the numbers, while saying something similar to Marshall from a completely opposite perspective.

Practically no children of single mothers were living on $2 a day in either 1996 or 2012 (the latest year for which we have reliable statistics), once the receipt of all government benefits are factored in. In 2012, fewer than one in 1,500 children of single mothers were living in what is called “extreme poverty.” This finding is consistent with other research.

Herein lies the challenge. If both sides agree that “official poverty statistics can create a misleading impression that hardship has increased,” then both sides must get out from beyond their political lens to evaluate not whether welfare reform has been a net positive — it has — but what’s the next step.

Progress is being made. More needs to be done. But the debate must start from the perspective of not what should be done, but whether we can eradicate poverty or whether it will always exist to some extent.

Then it’s a matter of determining how much help is enough to ensure that the least among of us has the means to live in safety and with dignity. This is where agreement is elusive and where next measures stall. Determining what those in deep poverty need, want, and are capable of contributing could go a long way to getting past arguments over whether six in one is equal to a half dozen in the other.

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Are Poor People More Optimistic Than Others About Their Futures?

August 18, 2016

Poor people are more likely than non-poor people to think that they will be able to pull themselves out of poverty. Forty-eight percent of the poor say most poor people will remain poor for a long time while 41 percent say poverty is a temporary condition. That compares to 60 percent of people who said that the poor will remain poor for some time.

Meanwhile, 61 percent of Americans, including 64 percent of Americans living in poverty, say that most poor people who receive welfare benefits would rather earn their own living instead of staying on welfare.

Those are some of the findings from a new Los Angeles Times poll, conducted in partnership with The American Enterprise Institute, a top Washington think tank. The poll provides other stark findings about how Americans think about people in poverty.

America’s political parties may want to take note of those findings, particularly because 37 percent of people living in poverty defined themselves as somewhat or very conservative while only 31 percent defined themselves as liberals. Another 24 percent declared themselves moderate.

Only 27 percent of Americans said they believe that conditions for poor people have improved in the last 10 or 15 years while 42 percent say it has gotten worse for poor Americans. Only 13 percent said they believe that the poverty rate has declined in 30 years.

In reality, 14.8 percent of people were living beneath the official poverty line in 2014, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 3 points below the rate that lived in poverty in 1965, the year that President Johnson’s War on Poverty programs began, and 3.3 percentage points higher than in 1985, when the AEI-LA Times study was first conducted.

The 2016 survey mimicked the 1985 survey and demonstrates how (little) opinion has changed over 30 years. The seemingly small differences over that time frame may be due to the fact that little has changed when it comes to public policy — or more exactly, how much change has kept things the same. The pivotal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which is coming up on its 20th anniversary since enactment, shifted responsibility for welfare from the federal government to states, but poverty is more persistent than the “T” in TANF intended.

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities notes that only about half of the federal and state grant money for TANF actually went to “core welfare reform activities” in 2013, in part because “states can use TANF funds much more broadly than the core welfare reform areas of providing a safety net and connecting families to work; some states use a substantial share of funding for … other services and programs.”

So what else do people think of the poor, and how do the poor perceive themselves? Other poll findings that stand out:

Fifty-four percent of people as a whole, and 47 percent of people living in poverty, said they believe that the potential loss of welfare benefits “almost always” or “often” impacts the decision of unmarried people on whether to get married. This is an interesting finding given that much work has been done demonstrating that marriage helps families get out of poverty. It’s notable also that 47 percent of all the people who took the survey reported they are married, but only 23 percent of the people in poverty who answered the poll said they are married.

About 87 percent of Americans — including 81 percent of individuals living below the poverty line — believe that requiring poor people to seek work or participate in a training program in return for benefits is a better approach than providing benefits without asking for anything in return.

Fifty-four percent of people think welfare encourages dependency, down from 59 percent in 1985. On the flip side, more people feel negatively about the way things are going, 67 percent of people, and 66 percent of people who are poor, said they are dissatisfied with the country’s direction. That pairs with the increase in the number of people who say that it’s harder for poor people to find work, up to 57 percent today from 43 percent in 1985.

Seventy-six percent of people, including 71 percent of people in poverty and 80 percent of people not in poverty, said they thought that welfare programs are badly designed or under-funded, and that’s why they have failed to pull people out of poverty.

Thirty-five percent of people said government has the greatest responsibility for helping the poor — that’s twice as high a percentage over those who responded that either churches, charities, families, or the poor themselves have the greatest responsibility.

The entire poll, conducted between June 20 and July 7, 2016, can be viewed here. The survey was conducted among 1,202 adults, including 235 adults living in poverty. The survey oversampled individuals living below the poverty line to get reliable estimates of the views of poor Americans themselves.

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The Persistent Marriage Penalty and Its Impact on Family Formation

July 29, 2016

You thought this was resolved in the ’90s, didn’t you? It wasn’t.

“Almost one-third of Americans aged 18 to 60 report that they personally know someone who has not married for fear of losing means-tested benefits.”

That’s right, the marriage penalty still exists on families who receive government subsidies, and it is impacting more families as the safety net expands.

Now, the bias up the social ladder has traditionally been to assume that people who have kids without getting married are of questionable moral character because who would go have a baby without having a stable household, right? After all, studies show that children raised by their biological parents in married households have a likelier chance of success in school, a stable job, and upward mobility.

That notion of planning your marriage, then your family is outdated in a lot of communities, not least because when is it ever a good time to have a kid? So maybe the decision to not marry is not a question of moral repute, but in fact a question of public policy working against a loving family whose only commitment phobia is filling out the paperwork.

At least 43 percent of families with children 18 and under receive some kind of means-tested aid from the federal government, from Medicaid to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program funds. That number goes up to 47 percent for families with children five and under. And this is what they are likely to face if they marry.

… 82 percent of those in the second and third quintiles of family income ($24,000 to $79,000) face this kind of marriage penalty when it comes to Medicaid, cash welfare, or food stamps. By contrast, only 66 percent of their counterparts in the bottom quintile (less than $24,000) face such a penalty. …

Couples where each partner’s individual income is near the cut-off for means-tested benefits—are about two to four percentage points less likely to be married if they face a marriage penalty in Medicaid eligibility or food stamps. Most of these couples are in the second and third quintiles of family income for families with children two and under ($24,000 to $79,000).

Indeed, this recent report on the marriage penalty notes that couples’ combined income in that second and third quintile of earners ($24,000 to $79,000) could face penalties of lost benefits up to one-third of their income if they were to marry.

A valid question is why has the social safety net grown so large that families making nearly $80,000 are still receiving benefits? That may make sense if you’re talking about a family in Brooklyn or around the Beltway outside Washington, D.C., or  Honolulu, or San Francisco, for example, but that’s certainly not the situation in Indianapolis, Louisville, Omaha, Memphis, Tulsa, and so on.

The answer lies in the decision not to marry. If one unmarried person is reporting income to an agency, then the household earnings don’t get counted as $80,000, it only gets counted as the one family member’s income. A combined income would phase out benefits whereas a reported single income would qualify.

Certainly, no one wants to see anyone in need unable to receive the staples of shelter and food, but as the below infographic demonstrates, 59.7 percent of cities surveyed by Experian (click on it to enlarge) have a lower median income and a lower cost of living than the national average so many recipients can in fact afford to live without federal benefits.

Cost of living in America infogrpahic

The report does not challenge the expansion of the safety net to the lower-middle class, but it does raise the question of whether public policy discourages couples from marrying. And as the evidence shows, a significant minority of Americans say they have seen marriage ruled out because of the policies.

So how does government policy correct itself to not penalize lower-middle-class couples for being married when they start their family? The report makes four suggestions:

– In determining eligibility for Medicaid and food stamps, increase the income threshold for married couples with children under five to twice what it is for a single parent with children under five. Such a move would ensure that couples just starting a family do not feel pressured to forgo marriage just to access medical care and food for their families. The cost of this policy change would be limited, since it would only affect families with young children.

– Offer an annual, refundable tax credit to married couples with children under five that would compensate them for any loss in means-tested benefits associated with marrying, up to $1,000. This would send a clear signal that the government does not wish to devalue marriage and, for couples, it would help to offset any penalties associated with tying the knot.

– Work with states to run local experiments designed to eliminate the marriage penalty associated with means-tested policies. States could receive waivers to test a range of strategies to eliminate penalties in certain communities, and to communicate to the public that the penalties are no longer in force there. Successful experiments could then be scaled up to the national level in future efforts to reform means-tested policies.

– Encourage states and caseworkers working with lower-income families to treat two-parent families in much the same way as they do single-parent families. For instance, states could ease the distinctive work requirements that many have in place for two-parent families receiving cash welfare. Reforms such as this one would put two-parent and single-parent families on a more equal footing when it comes to public assistance. More generally, policymakers and caseworkers should try to eliminate policies and practices that effectively discriminate in favor of single-parent families.

Read the report on the marriage penalty’s impact on lower-middle income families.

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