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U.S. Census Bureau Using 1960s Guidance to Measure Poverty in 2022!

By John Powers 0
U.S. Census Bureau Using 1960s Guidance to Measure Poverty in 2022

This fall, the U.S. Census Bureau released data that showed a historic drop in the number of poor children in the U.S. in 2021. Many people think that after many pandemic stimulus programs end, these numbers will start to go up again.

Still, these numbers can teach us something about what we can do as a country to ease the pain of millions of Americans every day. The biggest problem is that the way we measure poverty in the U.S. today is very old and needs to be completely changed.

Inspired By President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty

In the 1960s, during President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, an economist at the U.S. Social Security Administration named Mollie Orshansky used a set of criteria to estimate the level of income insufficiency in America. This was the first time that poverty thresholds were set.

She used a complicated formula to come up with these limits, but in simple terms, she took the cost of the Economy Food Plan, which determined who could get food stamps, for families with three or more people, and multiplied it by three. This became the basis for how much money a person must make to be considered poor in the U.S.

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“If you can’t say for sure “how much is enough,” you should be able to say with certainty “how much, on average, is not enough.” This is what Orshansky wrote.

Over the years, people have tried to change the poverty lines to account for small changes in the cost of living. But this multiplier is still used to figure out what the poverty line is in the U.S.

Nowadays Conditions

In 2022, a family of four in the U.S. will need $27,750 to not be poor. Since the year 2000, it has gone up by almost $10,000. During the same period, the average price of an American home went up by more than $300,000. The Center for American Progress found that in the early 1960s, the poverty line was about 50 percent of a family of four’s median income, but today it is only about 28 percent.

The way we figure out the poverty line in the U.S. is based on data and analysis from more than 50 years ago, with small changes to account for inflation. Since the 1960s, a lot has changed in the world. But how we measure the problem hasn’t changed in a long time.

The national poverty line is no longer a good measure of poverty. Even as a measure of how much people depend on food, it is a very low number, given how much the cost of food has gone up, especially now when inflation is at a record high.

When the financial needs of today’s world, like internet access and cell phone service, which weren’t thought of in the 1960s but are now essential to a household’s basic infrastructure, are added, the income of those living below the poverty line quickly disappears. The way the U.S. Census Bureau calculates its statistics is very old, so millions more people don’t live below the poverty line but still face huge problems and can’t get help.

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It doesn’t make much sense to have a single poverty line for everyone. It is based on the idea that the needs of a family living in a big city are the same as those of a family living in the country.

Mark Bergel, the co-founder of the anti-poverty group Shared Humanity Project, has done more than anyone else to change this policy for this reason (SHP). Bergel has been saying for a long time that a universal threshold is a wrong way to measure poverty in the United States.

National Poverty Plan Standards

Instead, his group has made National Poverty Plan Standards that are based on 50% of the median income for every county in the country. This is similar to how the original poverty thresholds were set. They also take into account changes in the cost of living, not just inflation, and give a more accurate picture of real financial needs.

A powerful new four-part documentary by the Public Interest Registry about SHP’s plan to get rid of poverty in all of America shows Bergel and his group’s work.

The way we measure poverty might seem like a bureaucratic task, but millions of people depend on it and important policies are built on it. It decides who is eligible for many different programs, such as Medicaid, food stamps, Head Start, and services for mothers’ and children’s health.

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The way we’ve been figuring out how much people are poor is fundamentally wrong. It makes a huge mistake about how many people in America live in poverty. It keeps people from getting access to reliable data that could help them understand how bad things really are in America.

The problem isn’t getting better; it’s getting worse. We need to change it so we can help the people who need it the most.

Lyndon Haviland is a well-known scholar at the CUNY School of Public Health and Health Policy. He has a Ph.D. and an M.S. in public health.

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