U.S. Children’s Poverty Level Is Down 17% Since 1993

The number of children living in poverty in America has declined significantly since 1993, partly reversing a longer-term increase that began two decades ago, according to a Columbia University study to be released today.

The percentage of children living in poverty fell 17% from 1993 through 1998, the study says, and the improvement was particularly pronounced in traditionally poor Southern states, such as Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas and South Carolina. Even with that decline, however, 18.7% of American children younger than 18--almost 1 in 5--lived in families in 1998 with incomes below the federal poverty line of $16,660 for a family of four.

The nearly 13.3 million children represented a decline from the 1993 level of 15.6 million children, or 22.5%, who were living in poverty. But the 1998 figure remains above the 1979 rate of 16.2%, when 10.3 million children were poor.

Researchers say that the declining poverty rate appears to reflect two fundamental trends of recent years: the booming economy and welfare reform initiatives.

In California, home to 1 in 6 poor children, there was good news and bad, according to the report, prepared yearly by the National Center for Children in Poverty. The 1993-1998 period has seen a 15% decline in California children in poverty, from 27.4% to 23.3%. But that drop has only begun to offset extraordinary growth in California’s rate of child poverty over the last two decades.

From 1979 to 1998, California’s rate of child poverty increased 62%. The number of poor children jumped from 900,000 to 2.15 million.

“California had an especially rough period, and it’s recovered only partly from that increase,” said Julian Palmer, who directed the Columbia study. While the state’s child poverty rates surged during the economic downturn of the late 1980s and early 1990s, California’s economic uptick has shrunk the ranks of the state’s poor children by almost 400,000. “It has been positive, moving in the right direction,” Palmer said.

On a related issue, a study released Thursday by the Children’s Defense Fund found that nearly 12 million children lack health insurance coverage, despite the fact that 7 million of them are eligible for Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program in the states. California and Texas each had more than 1 million uninsured children, and 1 in 3 Latino children is without health coverage, the group found.

Such reports come in a year when politicians of both major parties have decried the level of child poverty and proposed widely divergent remedies. On Thursday, Vice President Al Gore said that Democrats deserve credit for welfare reform policies that “moved millions from welfare to work” and for an economic climate that provided jobs for those moving off the rolls. Gore has said that he would support a proposed $1 hike in the minimum hourly wage and an expansion of the earned income tax credit, which raises many working-poor families above the poverty line.

Gore also has called on state governments to offer preschool programs to all children, an initiative that likely would have a strong effect on children of the working poor.

Vowing to “leave no child behind,” Republican presidential nominee George W. Bush has proposed an $8-billion package of tax incentives and government grants to expand the work of faith-based charities in providing job training, mentoring and other services to the poor. And he has unveiled a broad tax cut that he says would reach out to “working families on the outskirts of poverty.”

On Thursday, Gore promised to focus on “the next generation of welfare reform, to encourage responsible fatherhood.” Such initiatives, supported by both Republican and Democratic candidates, could affect poor children by driving down the number of single parents and increasing the role of wage-earning fathers in their children’s lives.

The Columbia study suggests that, by targeting working families for government initiatives, either candidate likely would reach many children living in poverty. In recent years, as welfare reform and a thriving economy have drawn more parents into the work force, kids with working parents have become a larger share of the nation’s poor children. Roughly two-thirds of the nation’s poor children now have at least one employed parent, according to Palmer, a rate that has been climbing since 1993.

Those who track welfare reform acknowledge that the effects of the nation’s sweeping social experiment on child poverty have been mixed. Three states--Illinois, New Jersey and Tennessee--have cut deeply into their welfare rolls and seen significant declines in child poverty at the same time.

But far more states, according to the Columbia study--North Dakota, Idaho, Georgia, Montana, Oregon, Alabama, Colorado, North Carolina and Arizona--have cut their welfare rolls by more than half but had no improvement in their child poverty rates. This suggests that, while moving off public assistance, many parents do not find jobs that can lift their families out of poverty.