According to the NYT, there are no clear/real numbers of the poor since 1963.
NOLA opened the ugly door of poverty and maybe that needed to happen.
A good example is the poverty line, the nation’s official measure of need. Economists have long argued that the poverty line should be revised to provide an accurate picture of who is actually poor. Yet it has remained essentially untouched since 1963, when Mollie Orshansky, an economist at the Social Security Administration, first came up with it.
Today, there is a consensus among economists that it is no longer on the mark. “Everyone agrees we need a better measure,” said Douglas J. Besharov, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland.
To him and many others, the public lacks an accurate test of who is poor, making it far harder to justify actions, whether by government or by individuals, intended to alleviate poverty.
I don’t know how we would ever really know the real number of poor citizens or the percentage. We don’t like being poor. And it changes every day due to lay-offs, medical crisis, divorce etc.
Still, much has changed since the 1950’s. Today, families spend something close to 12 percent of income on food, for example, not one-third. And while some of the remaining 88 percent may go to nonessentials, items such as housing, transportation and health care are significant, and expensive, factors.
Much is at stake. The poverty line is widely viewed as an indicator of social progress. A decline in poverty is seen as a national achievement, and an increase in poverty as a sign of problems.
Day to day, the poverty measure directly affects the lives of millions of Americans. At least $60 billion in federal aid annually is linked to the poverty measure, and $260 billion or so in Medicaid spending takes it into account. At the state and local level, thousands of government programs use the poverty line to determine eligibility.
So why hasn’t such an important statistic been updated to reflect modern conditions? The answer is politics. Thanks to a quirk of history, the poverty indicator, unlike many other economic statistics, is not under the jurisdiction of an authoritative statistical agency like the Bureau of Economic Analysis or the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Instead, it resides in perhaps the most political place of all: the office of the president. And during the last four decades, no president of either party has wanted to draw attention to a statistic that the nation has come to take for granted, especially if updating it might cause the number of people regarded as living in poverty to increase.
Do we need to know, want to know or care to know?
Having been poor upon occassion, and knowing that another medical crisis, loss of spouse by death or divorce, I would be there again. I dare say that many of us are on the edge.
