Too good to be true?

 A month or so back, I spoke with New York Times reporter Jason DeParle, who was working on a story about child poverty in West Virginia. That article came out yesterday (or was it the day before?) and it had some surprising conclusions, the biggest one being that child poverty declined dramatically in the US over the last few decades and that this change was even more dramatic in West Virginia:

 Child poverty has plunged over the last generation, and few places have experienced larger declines than West Virginia, a state that once epitomized childhood deprivation. Poverty among the state’s children fell nearly three-quarters from 1993 to 2019, according to a comprehensive analysis by Child Trends, a nonpartisan research group, conducted in partnership with The New York Times. That compares to a 59 percent drop nationwide.

If West Virginia’s child poverty rate was as high now as in 1993, nearly 80,000 additional children would be poor, a population larger than the state capital, Charleston.

That was news to me, especially considering that these changes didn't include the vast influx of COVID related federal aid from the CARES Act and the American Rescue Plan. It kinda sounds too good to be true, although my WV comrades have worked on that issue for years and years.

Just when I was beginning to think my life wasn't a total waste, a friend--we can call him Mr. Buzzkill--sent me this response to the national poverty numbers in the Times article. Short version: different poverty measures show vastly different results.

However that data fights wind up, I did find some encouragement in the story itself, which profiles some West Virginia families living in or near poverty. It showed how years of undramatic grunt work on policy at the state and even county level can eventually show some real positive changes for real people. 

I'm talking about things people worked on here, offensively and defensively, like EITC (Earned Income Tax Credit) outreach, defending SNAP, advocating for access to education for people in the "welfare" system and challenging its more draconian aspects, supporting state adoption and expansion of the Children's Health Insurance Program to 300 percent of the federal poverty level over13 years, Medicaid expansion, free school breakfast and lunch, defending child care, support services for people on or leaving TANF, raising the state minimum wage and such can really make a difference in the lives of real people.

I think at least those programs and policies that so many West Virginias have fought for made things less bad than they would otherwise have been. I'll take that.