A wealth of data, July 29, 2010, The Economist: “What is poverty and when is a person poor? Most would agree that poverty involves not having enough of certain things, or doing without others that richer people take for granted. But what is ‘enough’, which goods and services really matter, and who should decide these questions-researchers, governments or international agencies-are less tractable issues. Perhaps the poor themselves should have the final word. But this presents its own problems. Tabitha, a 44-year-old woman from a slum outside Nairobi, told researchers from Oxford University that going without meals was ‘normal for us’. Diminished expectations are only one of the effects of dire poverty. In the world of international development, most have rallied around the ‘dollar-a-day’ poverty line (or more precisely, the $1.25-a-day measure) and its less acute cousin, $2-a-day poverty. These World Bank measures judge a person to be poor if his income falls short of a given level, adjusted for differences in purchasing power. In principle poverty rates based on these measures count the fraction of people in a country who lack the resources to buy a notional, basic basket of goods…”
Month: July 2010
Voter Registration at Public Assistance Agencies
Welfare agencies boost voters, By Richard Wolf, July 22, 2010, USA Today: “The recession that impoverished millions of Americans is producing a side effect: new voters. Lawsuits by voting rights groups in Missouri and Ohio have led hundreds of thousands of people to file voter registration applications at welfare agencies, as mandated by the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, or the ‘motor voter’ law. Cases pending in Indiana, New Mexico and other states, as well as new Justice Department guidelines, probably will boost those figures. Voting rights advocates say millions of low-income people could be registered this way. A U.S. Election Assistance Commission report in 2007-08 showed 21 states registered less than 1% of voters at welfare offices. Only Vermont, Tennessee and New York registered more than 4% that way…”
Census Small Area Health Insurance Estimates
- Census data reveal broad differences among states in rates of uninsured, By Lena H. Sun, July 28, 2010, Washington Post: “New census data released Tuesday confirm a huge spread in the rate of uninsured from state to state and the big difference in impact that can be expected as a result of the health-care overhaul recently passed by Congress. The statistics are for 2007 and show health insurance coverage by state and for each of the country’s roughly 3,140 counties. The numbers do not include the impact on millions of people who lost their jobs and health insurance after the recession began in December 2007. The 2007 snapshot shows that Massachusetts, which has achieved near-universal coverage, had the lowest rate of uninsured people under age 65, about 7.8 percent. States with the highest rates of uninsured were in the South and West: Texas was at the top, with 26.8 percent, followed by New Mexico (26.7 percent) and Florida (24.2 percent)…”
- 2007 data show state had 6.5 million uninsured, By Victoria Colliver, July 30, 2010, San Francisco Chronicle: “More than one fifth of Californians went without health insurance in 2007, with Bay Area counties having some of the lowest rates of uninsured people in the state, according to statistics released this week by the U.S. Census Bureau. The Small Area Health Insurance Estimates, which looked at every county in the nation, found that 20.2 percent of Californians were uninsured in 2007. The counties in California with the highest rates of residents without health insurance – Mono, Colusa, Monterey – tended to be smaller, rural or more reliant on agriculture than other regions…”