A New Measure of Poverty

I have been meaning to post on this bit of news for a while but, for one reason or other, had not gotten around to it -until today. You'd think this means that this is not "news" anymore, but I think it is still as newsworthy as the day I got this.

The US federal poverty thresholds have been critical in the administration of safety-net programs, and have been used to determine eligibility for these important supports.  For many years, advocates for low-income families have argued that the measure of poverty is arbitrary, is hard to adjust for cost-of-living increase, and has not adapted to societal shifts.  For instance, the current measure only counts cash income, does not factor in non-cash benefits (i.e. food stamps), does not account for out-of-pocket expenses (i.e. medicine, child care), and does not consider differences in cost-of-living from one city to another.

In recognition of these concerns, the federal government announced on March 2nd that they will be releasing the Supplemental Poverty Measure in the fall of 2011.  This supplemental measure was developed based on these recommendations from the National Academy of Science:

“The new supplemental poverty measure will provide an alternative lens to understand poverty and measure the effects of anti-poverty policies,” Department of Commerce Under Secretary for Economic Affairs Rebecca Blank said. “Moreover, it will be dynamic and will benefit from improvements over time based on new data and new methodologies.”

I can’t help but think this is a move in the right direction… what do YOU think?

A bit more reading, in case you didn’t get enough:

How Do We Measure Poverty?

http://www.ocpp.org/poverty/how.htm (includes some of the criticism):

Or, if you prefer a more comprehensive take, you can find the official scoop here: http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/povdef.html