The official poverty rate does not count the refundable portion of tax credits as income, even though the benefits are paid with a check from the Treasury. And the same mismeasurement problem also invalidated their original claim that the transfer payments were needed in the first place owing to high childhood poverty. That claim was invalid because the official child poverty rate was five times larger than it would have been had the Census merely counted all transfer payments as income to the recipient—only 3.1 percent versus the official 17.5 percent.9
