Highlights and report. Analysis at Moving Up, Center for American Progress, and Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.
Working on updating some of our Tulsa numbers on children under 6 in poverty. Post that soon. Basically, we didn’t see a huge movement in the Tulsa County/City numbers, measured as the share of children under 6. Even so, there were about 10% more kids under 6 last year living below poverty and below 185% of poverty.
(Still working on this. I was hoping to post some nifty Google spreadsheets but alas, WordPress won’t allow it.)
It’s important to note, as have others, that these figures come at the tail end of a long period of economic expansion nationally. As CBPP says:
This is unprecedented. Never before on record has poverty been higher and median income for working-age households lower at the end of a multi-year economic expansion than at the beginning. The new data add to the mounting evidence that the gains from the 2001-2007 expansion were concentrated among high-income Americans.
We are sure to see even greater deterioration this year as Tulsa, whose economy always lags national trends, catches up to the recessionary environment of 2008.
At the statewide level, of course, our friends at Oklahoma Policy Institute have done good stuff (PDF) with these numbers, and they look a whole lot better than my tables.
The margins of error around the published point estimates in Michah’s table are very large. For example, the margin of error around the 16,421 point estimate of the number of children under 6 living in Tulsa County below poverty is +/- 5,400. This implies that we are 90% sure the “real” number of children under 6 living in poverty is between 11,021 and 21,821!! Given the large margin of error, we are unlikely to reject the null hypothesis that the 2007 estimates differ from the 2006 estimates. And so we wait for the decennial Census of 2010 when the sample size in larger and therefore there are smaller margins of error.
Thanks Cindy. I should’ve been more careful in pointing out that the differences weren’t significant! (I wrongly assume other people realize that small differences like these are unlikely to be statistically meaningful, especially with the MOEs.)
Also, hooray for peer review!