"Yes, Poverty is Worse Than They Ever Admitted!"

Submitted by Tony Wikrent

Cross posted from DailyKos, but expanded:--

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The National Academy of Sciences has issued its own estimates of the number of Americans in poverty, and yes, it’s much worse than the official statistics have been telling us for the past decade. The new NAS formula estimates nearly 1 in 6 Americans, 15.8 percent, are living below the poverty line. That’s 48 million Americans.

By comparison, the latest official Census Bureau statistics are that 13.2 percent of Americans, or 39.8 million, are impoverished. It should be noted that the Census Bureau is reportedly cooperating with the National Academy of Sciences to get this information out as quickly as possible.

According to the Associated Press, the NAS took into consideration the rising costs of medical care, transportation, child care, as well as geographical variations in living costs. Unbelievably, the Census Bureau calculations never accounted for these costs, since they were first used in 1955. My guess is that this was a convenient way to hide the destruction of the working class beginning with the oil price shocks and Volcker interest rate shock of the 1970s, and horrific human impacts of the de-industrialization of the U.S. economy that was rapidly accelerated by the usury and speculation unleashed by Ronald Reagan’s deregulation mania. Not to mention the vicious attack on organized labor initiated by Reagan’s destruction of the air traffic controllers union.

Particularly troubling is the NAS’s finding that poverty among elderly Americans is actually twice what the official figure is. The NAS finds that 18.7 percent of Americans 65 and older - nearly 7.1 million - are in poverty. The traditional Census Bureau measure is 9.7 percent, or 3.7 million, elderly Americans in poverty. The Associated Press notes that the dramatic doubling of this statistics under the NAS measure is attributed to the NAS taking into account rising Medicare premiums, deductibles and the coverage gap in the prescription drug benefit.

MUCH MORE at.........

http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/yes-poverty-worse-they-ever-admitted

1st, these are the number of folks to lazy to get off their sofa's, move to another state and work instead of taking a government hand out. 2nd, these numbers are that high because of the illegals coming in and stealing american jobs. Remember these nit wits believe, no matter what the job loss numbers tells everyone else, that there are tons of jobs out there if someone is willing to work. I live in a GM driven area thats had almost all of the GM factories and foundries closed or sold to Delphi, yet the nit wits still run around repeating the old Reagan bull shit line about welfare queens, at worst there are tons of jobs in other states, you just need to pick a state, pack all your stuff and move, then you'll be on the road to being rich beyond your wildest dreams.

20 miles east of Toxic waste dump Midland, where Dow is their best friend and the stupidity runs bone deep. I've had these nit wits tell me all about seeing black folks going into the Social Security office, claim they were mentally ill and walk out with disability check. When I pointed out that SS 1, doesn't decide the disability claim at the local office and 2, no SS office writes checks nor do they issue checks at the SS office, the checks either come in the mail or direct deposit only, I was lying cause "they" saw it with their own 2 eyes.

Do not come to Florida .There are very few jobs down here.

But that's alright. People want to shoot down Michigan b/c of age old myths about the auto industry. Shoot away...we still have all that fresh water people in the south want to spread on the golf courses.

mindlessly.

I may eventually have to track down exactly what it is the locally revised definition is. Granted, they use the bugabear word "poverty"--and surely nobody is so cold as to care what that word actually means. They hear "big increase in poverty" and they assume that something has changed and it's not just a redefinition; they hear that "poverty" is underreported and to be superior they promptly accept the new definition . . . whatever it is, as though *that* mattered when there's poverty in the land.

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Partly done so. The Census says it was based on a 1995 redefinition, which at the time I thought pretty sound. The one drawback is that it's primarily focused on income from all sources, excluding insurance benefits, minus required expenses. If you're drawing down savings it leads to spurious results. My parents, in their 2300 sq ft house, frequent trips out to nice restaurants, new cars, etc., etc., are in dire penury by that measure. Still, no measure is perfect.

It does take into account things like entitlement programs (mostly) as well as routine expenses (such as work transportation), which are routinely included in other country's measure of poverty but not in the US's. So, for example: you make $13k, you're in poverty because your food stamps, unemployment, Pell grant, etc., etc., simply aren't included.

I suspect--but it's late, so checking will have to wait--that changes in how people do things, such as increasing their housing costs or going into debt--will create a false picture, as well. Like it or not, most CC debt is fully discretionary, whatever cherry-picked data may have to say on the matter. The focus on income is also a bit strange--poverty tends to be a more persistent thing and this definition provides a degree of volatility that lets it shift very quickly. I.e., you get fired, don't get unemployment for 3 weeks, so you're impoverished for three weeks. Sensitivity is a good thing, but that kind of sensitivity doesn't allow decent policy formulations.

One problem is where to place the cutoff between poverty and non-poverty. I don't know where the census placed it. If they used the same dollar amount, after adjusting for the new definition, they'd get very strange results, I think. A cursory glance at the 1995 redefinition/re-analysis seems to explicitly back off from stating a dollar amount--even excluding the entire geographic variation business--saying that a bit of research would have to be needed before such a thing was possible.