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发帖数: 29846 | 1 December 3, 2012 Posted by Warner Todd Huston
Mickey Kaus has alerted readers to a change in the way the federal
government figures the poverty line and that new way so alters the formula
that we will never be able to show any improvement in rates of poverty going
foward. Worse, the new formula stops measuring strict want and instead
measures a more vague “inequality” of income.
The Obama administration has reinvented the poverty formula and is now
calling it the “supplemental” poverty line.
“‘New’ is not necessarily ‘improved,’” Kaus dourly notes.
As Kaus explains, the old formula was based on, “the level that bought a
minimal market basket of food in 1963-4, adjusted for subsequent inflation
and multiplied by three.” The goal was to measure what level of income
could afford basic survivability in the current economy, giving a base line
of income that could meet basic human needs.
But the new formula is more complicated and “deceptive” to boot.
The new “supplemental” poverty line is a complicated measure produced
by formulas that are barely understood by poverty experts. It takes into
account in-kind government benefits, which is fine, and regional costs-of-
living. But at its core it is a deception: it measures not absolute poverty
but relative poverty–i.e. inequality.
Kaus points out that in the past it was possible to see rates of poverty
decrease as the nation grew, but now that won’t be possible, much to the
delight of the Old Media establishment.
Under the old poverty line, “poverty” could be eliminated as society
got richer–an achievable and widely shared goal. But the new poverty line
will rise as society gets richer (“adjust for rising levels and standards
of living”). The newly measured poor will always be with us in substantial
numbers, just as there will always be a third of the American population
trapped in the bottom third of the income charts. That will yield a
permanent, inextinguishable stream of NYT front page “poverty” stat
stories–even if “poverty” no longer means ”poverty” in the sense we now
understand the term.
Kaus isn’t the only one that noticed this change. Richard Bavier, a veteran
economic analyst at the Brookings Institute, says the new poverty line
formula is “carefully designed so that the public will think it is one
thing when it really is something else.”
Granted poverty will always be with us, but now the Obama administration and
its compliant Old Media lapdogs have made sure that it can never improve
regardless of how well the country does! |
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