Providing For Children
The View’s Sunny Hostin claims it’s “really reckless” to “get married” and “have more children” because “married” households “need over $400,000” in “annual income” to afford “childcare,” and since “most people don’t make over $400,000,” children are “born into poverty,” and their parents aren’t “able to feed” them.
IN FACT, less than 10% of all children in married families are in poverty, and child hunger is practically non-existent in married families. Hostin is misrepresenting an article from Lending Tree, which itself is fatally flawed. Here are the specifics:
- Per the Census Bureau, 6.0% of all children in married families are in poverty, and their median reported household cash income is $143,400 per year.
- In stark contrast, 35.8% of all children in single-mother families are in poverty, and their median reported household cash income is only $43,650 per year.
- A major correlate of poverty and income inequality is family disintegration — the polar opposite of getting married and having children.
- Per the USDA, less than 1% (precisely 0.29%) of all U.S. households with children have even one child who experiences hunger on an average day.
- Certain media outlets and organizations have reported that the daily child hunger rate is above 20% by falsely equating USDA data on “food insecurity” with “hunger.”
- Hostin alleges that a “LendingTree analysis” shows a “married household” needs “over $400,000 for childcare.”
- Lending Tree actually claims that all households (married or unmarried) “with 2 kids need” at least $402,708 in annual income to “comfortably afford child care.”
- LendingTree’s alleged basis for their $400,000 figure is that “under federal guidelines, child care is considered affordable when it accounts for no more than 7% of household income,” and “with average annual costs for care of an infant and a 4-year-old reaching $28,190, a family would need to earn $402,708 a year to stay within that benchmark.”
- In reality, the 7% federal benchmark is not for all households but only for “low-income families” who receive means-tested welfare from the “Child Care and Development Fund.”
- Census data show that “married-couple households with a SINGLE EARNER and two children” have median incomes around $100,000, and thus, they don’t even need to pay for childcare.
In totality, Hostin (one of the highest-earning broadcast journalists) and Lending Tree butcher the facts of this matter and display extreme unawareness of life for everyday Americans.
