This holiday season I continue to look at the SAIPE numbers from the Census bureau for trends in median income and poverty in 2022. The graph above shows the trend in median income for Cambria County from 1997-2022. It compares the county rate to the Pennsylvania and U.S. rates. Pennsylvania’s income level is virtually identical […]

This time of year it is important to remember those less fortunate than ourselves. The census bureau has released the Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE). The image above shows Cambria County had an increase in the overall poverty from 12.9% in 2021 to 16.2% in 2022. There was no corresponding increase in the […]

Last Thursday I went to a discussion of global and local poverty at Classic Elements in Johnstown. It was led by Dr. Charles Kupchella. He is a retired professor of biology at the University of North Dakota. Dr. Kupchella has written several books including Morality: How it Evolved, How it was Hijacked and Confounded by […]

Put People First PA has organized a Nonviolent Medicaid Army to combat cuts to the program. During the COVID pandemic, a social safety net was created to prevent people from being hurt by it. Now that the pandemic has been declared over (though people are still getting sick and dying from the disease). Last week […]

On Christmas Eve, I posted on the new Census Bureau poverty estimates for every county in the U.S. In the graph above, I correlated median household income with COVID Case Mortality for the 10 county region. It shows that median income predicts COVID case mortality accounting for 62.9% of the variability. County median income but […]

I finished being at the Juneteenth festivities in Johnstown and am ready to get back to county health rankings (CHR) and local COVID numbers. Case mortality (the number of deceased divided by the number of cases) will be the focus of this post. Two weeks ago, I focused on vaccination rates in the 10 county region. Case […]

Many progressives were disappointed in Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-WVa) no vote on the build back better act.  This is about more than merely scoring political points or infrastructure.  This is about programs like the expanded child care tax credit which gives assistance to low income parents like my friend Jennina Rose Gorman.  She was interviewed […]

  The number of corona virus cases has grown exponentially in Cambria County.  I have been keeping track of the number of cases in a google sheet as can be seen above.  The cumulative case line has been following a cubic trend with the polynomial, y = 0.0347×2 – 3051.6x + 7E+07.  This equation accounts for […]

As 2019 comes to a close I thought I would imitate other media news outlets and look at the top 10 posts on this site in terms of the number of page views.  The majority of the posts came in the early part of this year and in the later part.  Posts made before 2019 […]

In addition to the school district estimates that I posted about two weeks ago the Census bureau has produced estimates for every county and municipality in the US just in time for the holidays.  For Johnstown the poverty rate increased to 38.7% while it decreased slightly for Cambria County, Pennsylvania and the US. This is […]