Poverty in America: What is it, exactly?

[Botnst]

The Mismeasure of Poverty

By Nicholas Eberstadt

For well over a century, with ever-expanding scale and scope, the United States government has been generating statistics that might illuminate the plight of society’s poorest and most vulnerable elements. From the beginning, the express objective of such efforts has always been to abet purposeful action to protect the weak, better the condition of the needy, and progressively enhance the general weal.

America’s official quest to describe the circumstances of the disadvantaged in quantitative terms began in the 1870s and the 1880s, with the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the initial efforts to compile systematic information on cost-of-living, wages, and employment conditions for urban working households in the United States.1 U.S. statistical capabilities for describing the material well-being of the nation’s population through numbers have developed greatly since then.

Today the United States government regularly compiles hundreds upon hundreds of social and economic indicators that bear on poverty or progress on the domestic scene. Within that now-vast compendium, however, one number on deprivation and need in modern America is unquestionably more important than any of the others — and has been so regarded for the past four decades. This is what is commonly known as the “poverty rate” (the informal locution for the much more technical mouthful “the incidence of poverty as estimated against the federal poverty measure.”)

First unveiled in early 1965, shortly after the launch of the Johnson administration’s “War on Poverty,” the poverty rate is a measure identifying households with incomes falling below an official “poverty threshold” (levels based on that household’s size and composition, devised to be fixed and unchanging over time). Almost immediately, this calculated federal poverty measure was accorded a special significance in the national conversation on the U.S. poverty situation and in policymakers’ responses to the problem.

Just months after its debut — in May 1965 — the War on Poverty’s new Office of Economic Opportunity (oeo) designated the measure as its unofficial “working definition” of poverty. By August 1969, the Bureau of the Budget had stipulated that the poverty thresholds used in calculating American poverty rates would constitute the federal government’s official statistical definition for poverty. It has remained so ever since.2

The authority and credibility that the official poverty rate (opr) enjoys as a specially telling indicator of American domestic want is revealed in its unique official treatment. The opr is regularly calculated not only for the country as a whole, but for every locality down to the county level and beyond — on to the level of the school district. (It is even available at the level of the census tract: enumerative designations that demarcate the nation into subdivisions of as few as one thousand residents.)

Furthermore, U.S. government antipoverty spending has come to be calibrated against, and made contingent upon, this particular measure. Everywhere in America today, eligibility for means-tested public benefits depends on the relationship between a household’s income and the apposite poverty threshold. In Fiscal Year 2002 (the latest period for which such figures are readily available), perhaps $300 billion in public funds were allocated directly against the criterion of the “poverty guideline” (the Department of Health and Human Services’ version of poverty thresholds).3 The poverty rate currently also conditions many billions of dollars of additional public spending not directly earmarked for anti-poverty programs: for example, as a component in the complex formulae through which community grants (what used to be called “revenue sharing”) dispense funds to local communities.

Given its unparalleled importance — both as a touchstone for informed public discussion and as a direct instrument for public policy — the reliability of the official poverty rate as an indicator of material deprivation is a critical question. How accurately — and consistently — does the opr reflect changing patterns of material hardship in modern America or changes in the living standards of the U.S. “poverty population?” How faithfully, in other words, does our nation’s poverty rate describe trends and patterns in the condition that most Americans would think of as poverty?

Although our official poverty rate is now by and large taken for granted, having become widely regarded with the passage of time as a “natural” method for calibrating the prevalence of material deprivation in American society, the measure itself was originally an ad hoc improvisation — and arguably a fairly idiosyncratic one — and in practical terms appears to be a problematic descriptor of poverty trends and levels in modern America. For one thing, its reported results do not track well with other indicators that would ordinarily be expected to bear directly on living conditions across the nation. In fact, over the past three decades, the relationship between the opr and these other indicators has been perversely discordant.

While the official poverty rate suggests that the proportion of the American population living below a fixed “poverty line” has stagnated — or increased — over the past three decades, data on U.S. expenditure patterns document a substantial and continuing increase in consumption levels for the entire country — including the strata with the lowest reported income levels. And while the poverty threshold was devised to be measuring a fixed and unchanging degree of material deprivation (i.e., an “absolute” level of poverty) over time, an abundance of data on the actual living conditions of low-income families and “poverty households” contradicts that key presumption — demonstrating instead that the material circumstances of persons officially defined as poor have improved broadly and appreciably over the past four decades.

In short, America’s most relied-upon metric for charting a course in our national effort to reduce and eliminate poverty appears to offer unreliable, and indeed increasingly misleading, soundings on where we are today, where we have come, and where we seem to be headed.

The remainder of the lengthy article at: http://www.policyreview.org/138/eberstadt.html

[Brian Carlton]

I think the metric for poverty level should be the cellular phone.

If the household has a cellular phone, they are not counted as below the threshold of poverty.

It shall be called "The BC cellular phone poverty metric".

Maybe it will be a better indicator for you...........

[dkveuro]

Originally Posted by Botnst

......................................................................................

blah blah blah................

The remainder of the lengthy article at: http://www.policyreview.org/138/eberstadt.html

You mean there's MORE to this ?

Anyweather....you only need to know this, if you are poor, anyway...right ?

Would reading and replying then, indicate I'm not poor ?



.

[Kuan]

Poverty: The inability to lead the lifestyle that Best Buy and General Motors determine for you.

[peragro]

Originally Posted by Brian Carlton

I think the metric for poverty level should be the cellular phone.

If the household has a cellular phone, they are not counted as below the threshold of poverty.

It shall be called "The BC cellular phone poverty metric".

Maybe it will be a better indicator for you...........

Why so harsh Brian? Why don't we add has cable TV to the poverty requirements.

Thus if you have a cell phone and cable TV you aren't below the poverty line.

[Kuan]

A celphone can be cheaper than a land line.

[peragro]

Originally Posted by Kuan

A celphone can be cheaper than a land line.

That's why you should have a cell and cable before you are "poor".

[Plantman]

If u have a cell phone and ride the bus are you a wannabe poor person?

[Brian Carlton]

Originally Posted by peragro

Why so harsh Brian? Why don't we add has cable TV to the poverty requirements.

Thus if you have a cell phone and cable TV you aren't below the poverty line.

.........tongue in cheek, Matt..........tongue in cheek..........LOL.

[peragro]

Originally Posted by Brian Carlton

.........tongue in cheek, Matt..........tongue in cheek..........LOL.

Backatcha, Brian.

[peragro]

Originally Posted by Plantman

If u have a cell phone and ride the bus are you a wannabe poor person?

No, just sensible.

[mgburg]

Poverty: lifestyle

Being too lazy to care enough about one's own selfworth that one has to depend on the welfare state to bail one's own a$$ out of stink. THEN...

Regardless of how much is handed to one's self, that one has to find someone person/entity to cry to about what a bad deal one has gotten in life/previous life to have that person/entity run for public office and get elected, so that that one person can apply more taxes to another person/entity to the point of taxing that one to poverty to make sure that first person is satisfied that the politicians' place in government is secured by handing out the poverty-stricken taxpayers' cash to the non-taxpaying lazy-a**.


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[kerry]

The poor today are not as poor as the poor were in the past? Is this a new insight?

[peragro]

Originally Posted by kerry edwards

The poor today are not as poor as the poor were in the past? Is this a new insight?

Not if you're observant. In addition, I would observe that the poor in this country have it much better off than the poor in other countries.

This isn't new insight either.

[RobTheMod]

Uh, I would say something like having a household income of $75K+ yr and not having a prayer of affording a house within our lifetimes. But that's just me, literally...