Lanterna Rally

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The U.S. Census Bureau, with support from other Federal agencies, created the Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) program to provide more current estimates of selected income and poverty statistics than the most recent decennial census. Estimates are created for states, counties, and school districts. The main objective of this program is to provide updated estimates of income and poverty statistics for the administration of federal programs and the allocation of federal funds to local jurisdictions. A Government Accounting Office report issued in September 1990 identified $30 billion in annual federal allocations that rely on decennial census data. In addition to these federal programs, there are hundreds of state and local programs that depend on income and poverty estimates for distributing funds and managing programs. The SAIPE program: provides intercensal estimates of key income and poverty statistics for small geographic areas; provides measures of uncertainty of those estimates; and researches and investigates improved estimation methodology. Our current focus is on estimates which have proved tractable and of interest to sponsors. We do not provide estimates for the number of poor children under 5 at the county level or the number of poor people 65 and over at the state and county levels, since we cannot improve on estimates from the preceding census or from national surveys. We develop intercensal estimates on a state and county basis for the following statistics: total number of people in poverty; number of children under age 5 in poverty (for states only); number of related children age 5 to 17 in families in poverty; number of children under age 18 in poverty; and median household income. In addition, in order to implement provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, we produce the following estimates for school districts: total population; number of children age 5 to 17; and number of related children age 5 to 17 in families in poverty. The estimates are not direct counts from enumerations or administrative records, nor direct estimates from sample surveys. Data from those sources are not adequate to provide intercensal estimates for all counties. Instead, we model the relation between income or poverty and tax and program data for the states and a subset of counties using estimates of income or poverty from the Current Population Survey (CPS) Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC). We then use the modeled relations to obtain estimates for all states and counties. For school districts, we use the model-based county estimates and the decennial census distribution of the population of poor of each county over its constituent school districts. Estimating measures of uncertainty is an integral part of the overall process. We use estimated standard errors to provide a confidence interval around each income or poverty estimate that can be used to evaluate the quality of the estimates and help to form decisions about their use.