Homeschooling, 2011-12

Nearly 2 million children in the United States are homeschooled, according to a report from the National Center for Education Statistics. In the 2011-12 school year, 1,770,000 children aged 5 to 17 were taught at home, or 3.4 percent of the nation's school-aged children.

The rate of homeschooling is significantly above average among children in rural areas (4.5 percent) and non-Hispanic whites (4.5 percent).

The reasons for homeschooling, cited by more than half of parents who homeschool, are concern about the school environment (91 percent), the desire to provide moral instruction (77 percent), dissatisfaction with academic instruction at school (74 percent), and the desire to provide religious instruction (64 percent).

Source: National Center for Education Statistics, Parent and Family Involvement in Education, from the National Household Education Surveys Program of 2012

Health Insurance Dummies

Let's face it: most of the public does not understand health insurance. That's the finding of a Carnegie Mellon University economist who quizzed Americans on the meaning of common health insurance terms such as co-pay, co-insurance, and deductible. Only 14 percent could answer the four questions on the simple test correctly, according to the Washington Post.

With so little understanding of health insurance, asking the public what it thinks about the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is an exercise in futility. Many pollsters are doing just that, however, and the answers are all over the place. According to the most recent Kaiser poll, only 37 percent of the public has a favorable view of the ACA. Yet the 51 percent majority says it doesn't have enough information about the law to understand how it will affect them. But 71 percent think the law won't affect them or that it will make things worse for them. Yet 57 percent live in a household in which someone has a pre-existing condition. Apparently, the public doesn't know that the Affordable Care Act will prevent insurance companies from denying insurance to those with pre-existing conditions. And so it goes.

The confusion about the Affordable Care Act springs from the fact that Americans are sheltered from health insurance realities. Only 8 percent purchase insurance on their own and know the difficulty of navigating the marketplace. Americans are health insurance dummies because most are shielded from the truth by employers and federal programs. Forty-eight percent get health insurance through an employer who pays the bulk of the premium. Another 16 percent are covered by Medicare, a program for the nation's elderly, many of whom are unaware that the federal government and the nation's taxpayers foot most of the bill.

Right now it doesn't matter what the public thinks about the Affordable Care Act, because the public doesn't know much. During the next few months, millions of Americans will be getting an education about health insurance. Once schooled, their opinions may start to matter.

Sleep Aids

Many Americans depend on prescription drugs to help them sleep. According to a report by the National Center for Health Statistics, 4 percent of adults aged 20 or older used a prescription sleep aid in the past 30 days. Use of sleep aids rises fairly steadily with age, from a low of 1.8 percent among 20-to-39-year-olds to a high of 7 percent among people aged 80 or older.

Source: National Center for Health Statistics, Prescription Sleep Aid Use among Adults: United States, 2005-2010

Those Who Have Nothing

Forty-two percent of Americans do not have a 401(k), or an IRA, or a pension plan, or stocks, or mutual funds. Here is the percentage with none of these by generation...

Millennials: 53%
Generation X: 43%
Baby Boomers: 37%
Older Americans: 27%

Source: Harris Interactive, Almost Half of Americans Rate Job Market in their Region as Bad

Multigenerational Households: 2012

Among the nation's 81 million family households in 2012, only 3.7 million (or 4.6 percent) were multigenerational—defined as three generations of relatives living in one home. Most multigenerational families (64 percent of the total) are householders who live with a child and grandchild.

Minorities account for the majority of multigenerational family households. Here is the distribution of multigenerational households by race (alone) and Hispanic origin...

Asian: 7%
Black: 21%
Hispanic: 26%
Non-Hispanic white: 44%

Among both blacks and Hispanics, 8 percent of families are multigenerational. Among Asians the figure is 6 percent, and among non-Hispanic whites 3 percent.

Source: Census Bureau, America's Families and Living Arrangements: 2012

Health Care's Big Spenders

In any given year, a small proportion of Americans spend big on health care. The big spenders are those unfortunate enough to have a heart attack, car accident, serious illness, costly chronic condition, or some other health catastrophe.

According to data collected by the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, the top 5 percent of health care spenders in 2010 accounted for half the $1.263 trillion spent by the nation on health care. The top 50 percent of spenders accounted for 97 percent of 2010 health care spending.

Source: Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, Differentials in the Concentration in the Level of Health Expenditures across Population Subgroups in the U.S., 2010 

Broadband and Smartphones

Fully 70 percent of Americans have a broadband connection to the Internet at home, according to a Pew survey. The figure rises to 80 percent if you count smartphone owners in the definition of broadband adopters. When smartphones are counted, says Pew, differences in broadband adoption by race and Hispanic origin almost disappear...

Have broadband at home
Blacks: 64%
Hispanics: 53%
Non-Hispanic whites: 74%

Have broadband at home or a smartphone
Blacks: 79%
Hispanics: 75%
Non-Hispanic whites: 80%

Source: Pew Internet and American Life Project, Home Broadband 2013

Education is Getting Better

Percentage of Americans with children enrolled in kindergarten through 12th grade who think their child is getting a better education than they received as a child: 61%.

Source: AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, National Education Survey

Circumcision: 1979 and 2010

In 2010, 58.3 percent of male newborns discharged from hospitals had been circumcised during their hospitalization, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. This figure is down from 64.5 percent in 1979, but up from the low of 55.4 percent in 2007.

Circumcision rates have dropped sharply in the West since 1979. In that year, 63.9 percent of newborn males were circumcised. The figure fell to a low of 31.4 percent in 2003 and rebounded to 40.2 percent by 2010. Circumcision rates in the other regions have been more stable over the years. In 2010 the rates were 58.4 percent in the South, 66.3 percent in the Northeast, and 71.0 percent in the Midwest.

Did Your Mother Work?

Percentage of Americans whose mother worked for at least one year while they were growing up, by generation...

83% of Millennials
80% of Gen Xers
68% of Boomers
48% of older Americans

Source: 2012 General Social Survey

Can You Live Without It?

Percentage of Millennials (aged 18 to 36) who say they could live without...

TV: 35%
Sex: 20%
Internet: 17%

Source: Harris Interactive, The Not-So-United States of Technology

Discrimination in Past Year

Percent of people aged 18 or older who say they have "experienced discrimination or been treated unfairly because of race or ethnicity" in the past 12 months, by race and Hispanic origin...

Blacks: 35%
Hispanics: 20%
Whites: 10%

Note: Blacks and whites are non-Hispanic.
Source: Pew Research Center, King's Dream Remains an Elusive Goal; Many Americans See Racial Disparities

The 4th Anniversary of the Economic Recovery

So how are we doing? That's the question asked by Sentier Research in its review of our economic status on the 4th anniversary of the end of the Great Recession, from June 2009 through June 2013.

The answer is we're doing better, but we're still behind. Median household income in June 2013 was above the low point of August 2011, but still 4.4 percent below the median of June 2009. In other words, rather than experiencing a rebound in income during the so-called economic recovery, we experienced a post-recession decline, and now we're crawling our way out of that. Take a look at the trend in median household income (all in June 2013 dollars):

Median household income
$55,480 at the start of the Great Recession in December 2007
$54,478 at the end of the Great Recession in June 2009
$50,722 at the low point in August 2011
$52,098 as of June 2013

Sentier's report analyzes the socioeconomics of the post-recession struggle to recover, examining changes in household income between 2009 and 2013 by a variety of demographics such as household type, age of householder, educational attainment, race and Hispanic origin, number of earners, and region. One striking finding: of the 46 demographic segments analyzed by Sentier, only one segment experienced a statistically significant increase in median household income between 2009 and 2013. The single exception was households headed by people aged 65 to 74, their median income climbing 5.1 percent during those years.

Source: Sentier Research, Household Income on the Fourth Anniversary of the Economic Recovery: June 2009 to June 2013

The Disappearing Summer Job

Only 60.5 percent of 16-to-24-year-olds were working or looking for work last month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Typically, the labor force participation of young adults peaks in July. Over the decades, however, the percentage of 16-to-24-year-olds with a summer job has declined. In July 1989, more than three out of four (77.5 percent) 16-to-24-year-olds were in the labor force.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment and Unemployment among Youth—Summer 2013

The Minimum Wage: Then and Now

After adjusting for inflation, the federal minimum wage declined by 22 percent between 1979 and 2013. Here is the federal minimum wage in both years (in 2013 dollars)...

1979: $9.33
2013: $7.25

Physician Beliefs Drive Health Care Spending

It's not patients, but physicians who cause the variation in Medicare expenditures by region, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research study.

"Differences in physician beliefs about the effectiveness of treatments are the primary source of variation in Medicare expenditures," say the researchers. "As much as 36 percent of end-of-life Medicare expenditures, and 17 percent of overall Medicare expenditures, are explained by physician beliefs that cannot be justified either by patient preferences or by clinical effectiveness."

Source: National Bureau of Economic Research, Physician Beliefs and Patient Preferences: A New Look at Regional Variation in Health Care Spending, NBER Working Paper 19320

The Experience of Long-Term Unemployment

More than one in five men (22 percent) have experienced long-term unemployment during their career, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics' analysis of panel survey data. Long-term unemployment is defined as 27 or more weeks without a job. This finding comes from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, which has been tracking the experiences of people born from 1957 through 1964 for more than three decades. The cohort being tracked is the younger half of the baby-boom generation and now aged 48 to 56.

Long-term unemployment has affected some men more than others. Among non-Hispanic white men in the cohort, 19 percent had experienced a spell of long-term unemployment by 2010. The figure was more than twice as high among black men—41 percent had experienced long-term unemployment during their career. Only 10 percent of men with a bachelor's degree had been unemployment for more than half a year versus 25 percent of high school graduates and 40 percent of high school dropouts.

The average spell of long-term unemployment lasted 55 weeks and reduced men's earnings even years later. Four years after the first long-term unemployment spell, men's average hourly wages were 7 percent below what they had been four years before the unemployment began.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Long-Term Unemployment over Men's Careers

The Shocking Truth about How the Government Measures the Income of the Elderly

Older Americans are faring much better than younger ones, and they have been for well more than a decade. Between 2000 and 2011, the median income of households headed by people aged 65 or older grew 10 percent, after adjusting for inflation. At the same time, the median income of households headed by adults under age 55 fell by a steep 12 to 16 percent.

Now we find out it's even worse than we thought. Little known fact: when measuring household income, the government does not count money withdrawn from defined-contribution retirement accounts. That's right, the Current Population Survey, the American Community Survey, and the Survey of Income and Program Participation do not count withdrawals from IRAs and 401(k)s unless they are taken as annuities—a rare occurrence these days.

We're not talking pocket change here. According to a Social Security Bulletin study, one in five households headed by a person aged 65 or older withdrew money from a defined-contribution retirement account in 2009 (the most recent year analyzed). The median withdrawal was $3,300. Among those who took distributions, median household income grew from $42,000 to $50,000—an 18 percent boost.

The authors of the study conclude with this warning: "If household surveys—especially the CPS, which is used to develop official estimates of household income and the number of persons in poverty—do not accurately identify sources and amounts of income, they will provide misleading results. Inaccurate statistics about household income could lead to inappropriate policies."

If nothing else, a more accurate estimate of the incomes of the elderly will fully reveal the expanding economic sinkhole into which younger generations are disappearing.

Source: Social Security Bulletin, The Impact of Retirement Account Distributions on Measures of Family Income

Health Insurance Status of Children, 1996 and 2011

Children under age 18 by health insurance status in 2011 (and in 1996), by type of insurance...

Private insurance: 56% (68%)
Public insurance: 38% (22%)
No insurance: 6% (10%)

Source: Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, The Uninsured in America, 1996-2012: Estimates for the U.S. Civilian Noninstitutionalized Population under Age 65

Children Cost 23% More

Raising a child costs 23 percent more today than in 1960, according to the USDA. The average middle-income married couple can expect to spend $13,000 to $15,000 per year raising a child to age 18, for a total expenditure of $241,080. This is up from $195,690 in 1960, after adjusting for inflation. The cost estimate includes housing, clothing, food, transportation, health care, and child care/education. It excludes the cost of college.

Some of the expense of raising a child has declined over the decades. Food costs less in 2012 than in 1960, and so does clothing. But health care costs have climbed from 4 to 8 percent of the total cost of raising a child, and child care/education costs have grown even more as mothers went to work. In 2012, child care/education accounted for 18 percent of the total cost of raising a child, making it the second largest expense of childrearing after housing.

Source: USDA, Expenditures on Children by Families