It should be said that CA does not have the highest SPM.
DC does (20.4 vs 21). But that's not really the point of the article.
I don't fully understand yet why SPM is better than the "official" poverty metric, or why the calculations involved in SPM create such a dramatic difference between CA's official rate and their "SPM" rate. However, I'm willing to venture a guess that it's a fairly complicated interaction of policies and demographics which don't tell you much about the "success" of more conservative policies on eradicating poverty.
Plenty of conservative states have a higher SPM than plenty of other "liberal" states, so it seems to me that using it as an indictment/evidence for policy approaches on either side is fairly flimsy.
> I don't fully understand why SPM is better than the "official" poverty metric
I'm no statistician but here's what it says in the introduction section: Beginning in 2011, the Census Bureau began publishing the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), which extends the official poverty measure by taking account of many of the government programs designed to assist low-income families and individuals that are not included in the official poverty measure.
I'm not a US citizen so my understanding may be quite off but I assume that since (presumably) the states themselves do the official measure, then that's why they don't account for federal programs?
EDIT: I just realised that while the District of Columbia has the highest SPM, they're probably playing semantics. The article starts with "Guess which state" which excludes DC, a federal district. It's just weasel wording to get at Cali though :)
It should be said that CA does not have the highest SPM. DC does (20.4 vs 21). But that's not really the point of the article.
I don't fully understand yet why SPM is better than the "official" poverty metric, or why the calculations involved in SPM create such a dramatic difference between CA's official rate and their "SPM" rate. However, I'm willing to venture a guess that it's a fairly complicated interaction of policies and demographics which don't tell you much about the "success" of more conservative policies on eradicating poverty.
Plenty of conservative states have a higher SPM than plenty of other "liberal" states, so it seems to me that using it as an indictment/evidence for policy approaches on either side is fairly flimsy.