Outdated data sweep poverty under the rug

Remember the 1960s?  Hippies, free love, Vietnam, and civil rights? Our country’s current poverty measure was created during these distant and tumultuous years, with no adjustments since. Almost 50 years ago, economist Mollie Orshansky took the Department of Agriculture’s food plans and calculations of minimum need for different family types, and calculated the poverty threshold by multiplying the lowest, or “economy,” food plan by three, since it was determined that families spent approximately one third of their income on food.  Today, however, it is estimated that only one eighth of a family’s income goes towards food.  That’s problematic, to say the least.  If we were to multiply the economy food plan value by eight, it would give us a much higher poverty threshold, meaning millions more people would fall below our current definition of the poverty line.

Some, such as Nicholas Eberstadt of American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, believe that our current definition of poverty overestimates rather than underestimates poverty.  In his book The Poverty of the “Poverty Rate:” The Measure and Mismeasure of Want in Modern America, Eberstadt shows how traditional poverty indicators such as unemployment, per capita income, and educational attainment improved from 1973 to 2001, yet the poverty rate increased.  But his analysis is extremely inconsistent.  He uses indicators of relative poverty, or poverty specific to particular places and times, to critique an absolute poverty measure, a measure that does not vary from context to context, ignoring the fact that relative poverty can decrease while absolute poverty increases.  In D.C., for example, 14.14 percent of families lived in poverty in 1990.  That percentage decreased to 13.7 percent in 2000.  That seems to be a positive change, on the surface, but that’s only in relative terms.  If you look more closely, however, you will find that from 1990 to 2000, the number of families with an income of under $10,000 increased from 42 to 50. So while overall a smaller portion of the population is in poverty, more people are living in extreme poverty.

I believe that there needs to be an updated poverty measure that considers such factors as income, regional differences in cost of living, food, clothing, and shelter. Orshansky herself never intended her poverty threshold to be absolute or immutable. She rather envisioned it as a flexible indicator that could be updated as circumstances changed.

The question of how to define poverty has been a hot topic over the years. Under the first Bush Administration, the National Academy of Sciences published a report, “Measuring Poverty: A New Approach,” which made suggestions about how to change the poverty measure, touching on some of the more expansive factors mentioned above.  The NAS also recommended reevaluating and updating the poverty measure every year.

So now, the $64,000 question: What can we do about it?  We need to hold our politicians accountable and push them to support the new “Supplemental Poverty Measure.”  Part of Obama’s 2011 fiscal year budget, the measure is a new, alternative way to calculate poverty based largely on the NAS’s recommendations that will supplement the current measure.  While this administration’s budget makes marked improvements over its predecessors’, its caveat of being a solely supplemental measure doesn’t go far enough in correcting misinformation about poverty.

So make a phone call.  Write a letter.  People must come before politics.  We as a public need to be aware if there are more people are in poverty than we think there are.  We need to figure out how to accurately measure poverty so we can then better address it and find more appropriate solutions.