Interesting. The republican controlled House is passing piecemeal funding legislation. Aside from previously naming post offices and voting at every opportunity to defund Obamacare, they’d normally be hard pressed to find a vote button in the chamber. It must be confusing for them.

Representative Vicky Hartzler (r) via Twitter today:

Rep. Vicky Hartzler ‏@RepHartzler

House voted bipartisanly to fund pediatric cancer research. @SenatorReid won’t consider the bill. Come on Senate, #LetsTalk 8:18 AM – 8 Oct 13

Some of the responses:

Jill Floyd ‏@JillFloyd13

@RepHartzler Send clean CR & it will all be over. Why won’t you? B/c your #LetsTalk is the new “negotiate? I’ve sen hot mic vid @SenatorReid 8:20 AM – 8 Oct 13

Grim_Chkn ‏@grm_chikn

.@RepHartzler YOU had 19 chances and refused, stop being shady http://www.nationaljournal.com… … @SenatorReid 8:20 AM – 8 Oct 13

Randall Rogers ‏@Randy520

@RepHartzler @SenatorReid The same can be said about the house Cruz will not let the house vote on the clean CR so now what keep lying 8:21 AM – 8 Oct 13

Dress Your Book ‏@DressYourBook

@RepHartzler @SenatorReid its all or nothing. That is important but what about me getting paid to feed my kids! Thats important also! 8:24 AM – 8 Oct 13

Avocet ‏@_Avocet

@RepHartzler Congresswoman, why has the House not passed the regular 2014 appropriations bill to fund cancer research? #RepublicanWankers 8:27 AM – 8 Oct 13

Warren Smith ‏@WarrenESmith

@RepHartzler @SenatorReid pass a clean CR and those kids will get cared for. 8:35 AM – 8 Oct 13

Peter Ver Brugge ‏@p_verbrug

@RepHartzler This is the most backwards way to look at it. If you wanted to fund cancer research, why did you shut down the government? 10:21 AM – 8 Oct 13

Rusty Colbert ‏@RustyColbert

@RepHartzler @SenatorReid Put the clean CR bill up for a vote.. But you wont because GOP wanted this and will destroy America. #VOTEOUTGOP 3:41 PM – 8 Oct 13

Previously:

Rep. Vicky Hartzler (r): climate change comes to the teabagger caucus (October 5, 2013)

Rep. Vicky Hartzler (r): for every season, spin, spin, spin, there is a reason, spin, spin, spin… (October 5, 2013)

Rep. Vicky Hartzler (r): well, that didn’t go so well (October 2, 2013)

…I don’t think we’ll be seeing any open to the general public town halls in the district anytime soon…

It doesn’t look good, does it?

Up for one more interactive chart? This newest one is an interactive data wheel, prepared by the Annie E. Casey Foundation as part of its 2012 Kids Count Data Book. It compares the well-being of children by state.

Want to know how the welfare of Missouri’s children ranks compared to the other fifty states? Look no further:

–General well being:  26th

–Economic well being: 21st

–Education: 24th

–Health: 33rd

–Family and Community: 27th

Middling to low on all measures, which does not bode well for the future of the state. Particularly note that while our GOP legislators are throwing tantrums about Obamacare, refusing to implement health care exchanges, and otherwise making asses out of themselves, the provisions that we now have in place for our children’s health are ranked 17th from the bottom. There’s lots that could be said here about how our de facto GOP leadership (our governor, Jay Nixon, is a Democrat but has little appetite for losing battles) has short-changed average Missourians while fighting tooth-and-nail to keep tax rates low for businesses and wealthy Missourians.

It’s true, of course that states like Alabama and Mississippi are ranked much lower than Missouri, but since the the philosophy of government embodied by the leadership of most of the eleven states with the lowest overall rankings* is similar to that of our home state GOP (the case with nine out of eleven of the lowest ranked states), we should maybe start worrying that it’s only a matter of time. Note, especially, that Texas, usually alluded to by Republicans in terms of the “Texas Miracle” because its supposed prosperity is the result of a GOP-defined, “business friendly” climate, is ranked 44th in terms of the general welfare of its children.

If you want to see how the criteria determining the rankings were evaluated, check the complete Data Book report.

* The eleven lowest ranked States:  Oklahoma (40); California (41); Arkansas (42); South Carolina (43); Texas (44); Alabama (45); Arizona (46); Louisiana (47); Nevada (48); New Mexico (49); Mississippi (50).  

There was a short item on child poverty in today’s Kansas City Star:

Missouri among 7 states experiencing “very high growth” in poverty caseloads

By DAVID GOLDSTEIN

The Star’s Washington correspondent

WASHINGTON | Food stamp data show more children suffer poverty in Missouri today than a year ago….

The article cites a report, “The Effects of the Recession on Child Poverty: Poverty Statistics for 2008 and Growth in Need during 2009” [pdf], by the Brookings Institution and First Focus:

…Between August 2008 and August 2009, the number of people receiving food stamps, or what are now called SNAP benefits, increased by 7.0 million, or 24 percent, as monthly caseloads skyrocketed from 29.5 to 36.5 million participants.1 This extraordinary increase means that roughly 3.4 million more children were receiving SNAP benefits in August 2009 than a year earlier, based on data showing that almost half (49 percent) of SNAP participants are children.2 Tracking SNAP recipient data by state provides an initial sense of which parts of the country are experiencing the most dramatic growth in economic need among families with children and where we can expect to see the largest increases in child poverty during 2009….

Specifically for Missouri:

…Seven states combine very high growth in SNAP caseloads over the past year with average levels of child poverty in 2008 (between 15 and 20 percent, or relatively close to the national average). These states, located throughout the country, include Florida, Idaho, Maine, Missouri, North Carolina, Nevada, and Oregon…

[emphasis added]

According to the statistics cited in the First Focus report in 2008 Missouri had a child poverty rate of 18.6% with a margin of error of plus or minus 0.8%. This translates into 259,017 children. The child poverty rate in Mississippi was 30.4%. It was 9.0% in New Hampshire. It was 18.2% for the United States with a margin of error of 0.2%.

From the First Focus report:

…What makes use of food stamps, or to use the modern term, SNAP benefits, a good predictor of child poverty rates? SNAP is the broadest federal safety-net program providing assistance to low-income individuals and families. Almost all individuals and families with monthly earnings and other income below 130 percent of the poverty guidelines and no more than $2,000 in their back account are eligible to receive benefits. Nearly two-thirds of eligible low-income individuals do indeed sign up for and receive benefits. Uptake is higher in families with children and/or lower income: the participation rate was recently estimated as 95 percent among poor families with children.10 With such high participation among families with children, children make up almost half (49 percent) of all SNAP/food stamp participants, with their parents or other adults in their household making up another quarter (27 percent) of participants.11 Not surprisingly, the vast majority of SNAP recipients are poor: 87 percent of SNAP recipients have monthly incomes below the poverty guidelines and the incomes of the remaining 13 percent are not much higher.12 Finally, there is a high correlation between state child poverty rates and state food stamp recipiency rates, considerably higher than the association between child poverty and state unemployment rates (0.82 compared to 0.32 based on 2008 data).13…

And in Missouri from 2008 to 2009?:

…Nineteen states were classified in this analysis as having a very high increase in SNAP participants, namely, an increase equal to 2 to 3 percent of the state population (see table 3). These states include six states in the West (Arizona, Idaho, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington) and nine states in the South (Alabama, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia), as shown in map 2. The remaining four states are scattered across the Midwest and Northeast (Maine, Missouri, Vermont and Wisconsin)…

[emphasis added]

Missouri had an increase of 146,198 SNAP/food stamp participants (a 16% increase over 2008) an increase equivalent to 2.5% of the state’s population.

The conclusion of the report is even more distressing and frightening:

…Updated child poverty statistics will be released by the Census Bureau next August or September, providing further information about the breadth and depth of child poverty in the country in 2009. In the meantime, there is sufficient evidence to predict that most states will experience higher child poverty in 2009 than in 2008. Moreover, judging from past recessions, child poverty rates in many states will continue to rise over the next few years, even after the economy begins to recover.

Such predictions are sobering, since child poverty rates were higher in the United States than in most other rich nations even before the onset of the recession.18 Given the negative impact of child poverty on children’s long-term development, it is important to continue monitoring of child poverty rates, under the official poverty measures analyzed here as well as under the new alternative poverty measures being considered in Congress. Given inevitable lag in reporting of poverty statistics, however, it also is important to examine more contemporaneous measures of need, such as the SNAP participant counts highlighted in this issue brief, to get a more timely sense of the effects of the recession on children and their families.

Meanwhile, the republican majority in the Missouri General Assembly fiddles while the future of Missouri burns.