Most of the ongoing support was additions to unemployment wasn’t it? So that should have been replacing lost wages and you wouldn’t expect most of it to show up

Most of the ongoing support was additions to unemployment wasn’t it? So that should have been replacing lost wages and you wouldn’t expect most of it to show up in this “average poverty” metric. I know a lot of people saw more from those extended UE benefits than they were making at the time, but finding good numbers on how large of an effect that was has been difficult. I found one study that put the median recipient as replacing 105% of their lost income, and scaling from nearly 400% replacement for the bottom 1-4% of earners down to 100% replacement by the ~40th percentile. But they also noted that only about half the people who had a significant loss in income (defined as a >10% reduction) received any UE benefits at all. Overall it looked like more people had more of their income replaced than in prior recessions but more people lost their income than in prior recessions as well. And it still just seems off that in the midst of such a massive blow to the job market and especially the low end of the market that a even historically large unemployment increase for such a small segment of the population caused the “poverty” as measured by this metric to improve beyond our EU peers all while only addressing one portion of the entire tangled mess that is the American poverty dynamic. And agin without any of the comparative countries showing any changes at all in their own trend lines for the same time period. If a significant driver of this poverty metric was the increasing GNI coefficient, that GNI did drop quite a bit in the COVID period (in fact in a way that very closely mirrors this “average poverty” metric), but that drop was to mid 90s levels (roughly 0.40) and still well above the comparative counties (0.32 per the article). Which makes the sudden US improvement to better than 2 of the comparison counties seem anomalous. Again I’m not saying there might not be something interesting to be found in this metric, just that I don’t believe it’s accurately measuring what it claims to be measuring. I just don’t think the “average poverty” in the us was better than the “average poverty” in EU comparative EU counties given the vast disparity between the existing poverty programs and the relatively limited nature of the US ones during that time period even if they were historically bigger than the ones the US has normally employed during other financial crises. I can absolutely believe it got better during that time period. I can believe it got better to a larger degree relative to the comparative countries. My difficulty is in believing it get better to such a large degree that for the 2 biggest years of COVID your were better off being in poverty in the US than in the EU. Not with such a huge disparity between them at all other times.