Nearly eight million new poor people and that’s a good thing
Did you hear? They revised the poverty formula! There’s eight million new poor people in America this morning, and that’s a wonderful thing.
Our old poverty line formula was 50 years old, developed by a woman named Mollie Orshansky during the Cold War. At that time, food was the most expensive cost for a family. Think about your expenses now-a-days… Does that match up?
These days, housing costs, even with the bubble burst, are far more expensive that food or most anything else. The old poverty formula cruelly cut across poor families. Make $21, 834 a year and you were poor. $21,835? Well, clearly you’re doing just fine.
The new formula will also be adjusted for standard of living in different cities. New York has been adjusting it’s poverty formula for years, dramatically increasing the number of poor people, but also dramatically increasing the number of poor people eligible for services that can help them get out of poverty. New York’s formula raised the city’s poverty line to $30, 419 – still a meager sum for trying to make it in America’s most expensive city – but it covers a lot more families and gets them the help they need.
This new measure won’t replace the old measure just yet. It’ll be published alongside the old measure as a “supplement” to help officials understand poverty. But it’s the first step to revising a formula that’s incredibly out-of-date and hurting many families.
How? Well, I’ve written before about the “poverty trap.” That’s the idea that if you’re in poverty, but get a job promotion or a raise, it often makes you more poor than before because you lose many of the government benefits that helped you move forward. Suddenly, you can’t make ends meet, even though you’re making more money.
When we raise the poverty level a little, it could give these families an extra boost, helping them continue on the path to self sufficiency.
The new poverty numbers won’t be released until next year. But this move is an important one, and a brave political move. No administration wants 8 million more poor people on their watch. But as well all know, the first step to recovery is admitting the problem.
That means admitting the size and scope of the problem too.
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You are right. Anything that serves to illuminate the truth is a good thing. Even if it makes us wince.
Poverty is institutionalized in American society. First it was indentured servants, then slaves, then Irish, then Chinese, and as the industrial revolution took off, Europeans. In post-industrial America we have resumed our high levels of immigration at a rate not seen since the early 1900s and, in doing so, are maintaining a subsistence-wage slave class (people in poverty) of some 40-50 million. And perhaps a similar number of borderline impoverished. It frustrates me and irritates me that so-called progressives refuse to, as you put it, “admit the size and the scope of the problem.” Particularly the scope.
We need to put illegal EMPLOYERS in jail, so that illegal immigrants/undocumented workers will self-deport, thus “creating” some several million “new” jobs as well as a workers’ market for labor. And we need to reduce the immigration impact from its current 20 million (direct and indirect) per decade to something more like a few million, or even zero.
[...] is expected to raise the percentage of Americans living in poverty from 13.2 to 15.8 percent (an additional eight million all-of-a-sudden poor Americans), which should mean more funding for social services both from the [...]
[...] not likely change how poverty is handled, but perhaps how we see it – particularly since an additional 8 million people’s situations would be more realistically recognized – arise from 13.2% to 15.8% of the population. In [...]