JaserST4 said:
I looked at it and was not impressed. Their definitions and conclusions rely on circular logic, ambiguities and misleading data. Poverty is defined by income thresholds, income thresholds are defined by what the poverty level is determined to be at that moment.
If you look at the
history of the poverty thresholds, you find out that they aren't as arbitrary as you'd like them to be. The standards were constructed in the 1960s around a "nutritionally adequate diet" from 1955, based on budgeting averages from lower-income families at the time.
I don't remember the exact construction, but the rough explanation was that an average American family at the time would spend about 1/3 of its budget on food, so if a family's income wasn't three times the cost of a "nutritionally adequate diet" (remember, this is the 1960s, before the new wave of organic/low-fat/other-fashionable-trend foods came into play), then that family was "poor".
In the late 60s, it was readjusted for the Department of Agriculture's "nutritionally adequate diet" for 1965, instead of 1955. Since then it's been adjusted by the Consumer Price Index for inflation. That's it. It's far from arbitrary.
JaserST4 said:
It also doesn't take social provisions into consideration so someone on foodstamps/Medicaid may very well be better off than a working stiff making more money and paying for those services. How about college students, living at home or on grants? The retired? Military?
Single moms being subsidized by the state? etc. etc. The numbers aren't meaningful unless all aspects of living are taken into consideration.
The
official definitions take this into account somewhat. Grants, interest, Social Security, pensions and other non-job-related-income are included. College students living at home are counted as part of their parents' households; college students in dorms (as you do, on grants) are explicitly not counted one way or the other. Soldiers, too, at least those living on-base, are also explicitly not counted.
On the flipside, many of the homeless are also not counted - only those in shelters. The guy sleeping on the street may not be officially "poor", strange as that may seem.
It's not a perfect measure, naturally; no large-scale statistical breakdown is. As you said, it doesn't make any distinctions about regional differences in cost-of-living. $10,300 goes a lot further in, say, Hope, Arkansas than it does in San Francisco, I'll agree, though I still doubt it goes very far in either place, and half of that (the "severe poverty" numbers we've been discussing) will go even less. Most economists will agree that many expenses (housing, for example) have gone up much faster than the price of food.
So, avoiding the hot words "poverty" and "poor", we return to the raw data: one in twenty of our fellow Americans - sixteen million people, two and a half times the population of Washington state, almost as many as served in WWII - are living on $425 per person, per month, before taxes... or less. Most of them are trying to do it without government help. If you're convinced that they aren't hurting, or that their suffering isn't enough, somehow, to be worthy of consideration, then that's your prerogative. I'm only one guy on the Internet; I don't think I can change your mind.
Whatever helps you sleep at night, I guess.
I agree with his conclusions in general but I have no idea how he got there. From his response to me I can't exactly vouch for his reading comprehension.