Benchmarking poorest tax units against other reports

[MaxGhenis]

This isn't so much an issue as a heads up of relevant comparisons for the poorest households, which are notoriously difficult to measure. I did some analysis on tax units with incomes under $5/day, comparing to other sources mentioned in this Brookings paper (worth a read in full, as it's relevant to C-TAM). Here's one chart from the notebook:

There's more context on this in the notebook, but to summarize:

• SIPP is probably the best comparison, given it's income measured longitudinally over a year.
• The interval of SPM is unknown (I asked the author), but overall it's probably a more trustworthy source if it can be done over a year.
• CEX measures consumption instead of income, so isn't apples-to-apples, though is an interesting caveat when reporting on this group.

Context is that I'm researching replacing the CTC with a universal child benefit, and the huge gains for the bottom 5%--given their low current incomes--motivated this investigation. All analysis excludes tax units with negative current after-tax income.

To the extent this is an issue, it may just be worth considering calibrating results against these surveys, or keeping track of research around the poorest households until that becomes more valuable.

[Amy-Xu]

@feenberg Could you take a look at this issue? What do you think?

[martinholmer]

@Amy-Xu, What's the status of C-TAM issue #61, which was opened by @MaxGhenis over six months ago on 2018-Feb-28? Is there any benefit to leaving it open? If so, what are you planning on doing to resolve this issue?

@MattHJensen @andersonfrailey @feenberg