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Poverty Rates - Liberal and Conservative Complaints
It's important to remember that the official poverty rate came about largely by happenstance and was not the result of a carefully thought through analysis. An economist named Mollie Orshansky at the Social Security Administration made the first estimate of the poverty rate in 1963. Ms. Orshansky, who died in 2007, had some data from the Department of Agriculture on food budgets for families of different sizes and incomes. She saw that food constituted about a third of spending by poor families and thus assumed that three times the budget for food would approximate the poverty rate.This back of the envelope calculation was seized upon by the White House under Lyndon Johnson, which turned Orshansky's figure into the official measure of poverty. Since that time, the original poverty measure of $3,000 for a family of four has simply been increased by the rate of inflation. In 2010, the official poverty threshold for a family of four (two adults and two children) was $22,113. Three bullets from each point of view, some proposals, and the conclusion if the definition were adjusted: There are fewer poor people under age 18 and more over age 65. There are fewer blacks in poverty and more of Asian descent. There are more poor people living in urban areas and fewer in rural areas. There are more poor people in the Northeast and West and fewer in the Midwest and South. Such results clearly have political implications that go beyond a simplistic left-right divide. Insofar as the federal government will probably be spending less on poverty reduction in coming years, as deficit reduction measures are implemented, it will be more important to target increasingly limited government resources more efficiently. Reprogramming federal programs to aid those most in need while scaling back benefits to those that may be relatively well off will limit the impact of aid cuts that probably cannot be avoided. This is the best reason to have a more accurate measure of poverty. Except that the fact that these resources may be trimmed is not the only reason to be more efficient. Too bad we didn't have this discussion 20 years ago. I wonder if government could be made more efficient in any other programs? [snort] Posted by: Bobby 2011-11-13 |
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