Reading practice 60
SOCIAL SCIENCE: Defining the Poverty Line: A Political Question
Poverty is an enduring problem that must be addressed by all modern societies. In fact, some ethicists say a civilization can be judged by how well it treats its least fortunate. By this measure, the United States has much to be proud of. On a national level, the United States has done remarkable work to decrease the suffering of the poor by subsidizing food, housing, and education, and even by giving money directly to those who need it the most. Still, even in the public sector projects have to be evaluated to see if they are effective.
No one can measure the benefits of aid without defining what poverty is, and when someone has been lifted out of it. This leads to one very political question: How exactly should poverty be measured1?
The question of poverty is extremely complex. Should it be considered absolute—as a simple matter of the availability of food and shelter—or should it be relative to the goods and services enjoyed by the society as a whole2? In other words, if a person can afford a DVD player but not to live in a safe neighborhood, is that person poor? Certainly something as fluid as the economy can affect any number of forces to cause financial suffering—sometimes quite suddenly. Still, according to our federal government, there is a specific measure, the "poverty line," that answers the question. Such a measure was devised in 1963 by government economist Mollie Orshansky, then working for the Social Security Administration under the jurisdiction of the Office of Management and Budget.
Orshansky's statistical measurement was one small part of the federal government's plan to attack the difficult national economic conditions that were hurting millions of Americans in the early 1960s. President Lyndon Johnson labeled the plan the government's "War on Poverty;" and it led to such national programs as Head Start, VISTA, and the Jobs Corps. Orshansky developed her poverty threshold from a Department of Agriculture study outlining the cost of nutritionally adequate meals.
From the Agriculture study, Orshansky took the most economic and healthy meal design she could find. She then estimated statistically that the average American family in the 1950s spent approximately one-third3 of its household income on food; from there, she multiplied by three the cost of the most economically efficient, nutritional diet. This multiplier effect, in theory, produced the level of pre-tax household income at or below which a family should be considered poor. Orshansky's calculation was distributed for use across the government, and the measure came to be known as the poverty line. It has been scaled every year for inflation, and it is adjustable to household size.
Given the decades-old origins of this measure and the limited data available to Orshansky at the time, it is fair to wonder if her standard is still accurate. Studies show that it is not. While families today spend about 12 percent of their income on food—nowhere near the 33 percent assumed in the 1950s—the cost of important budget items, such as housing, transportation, and health care, has increased dramatically4. Orshansky's poverty measure, which only takes into account the ability of a household to provide itself with food, is missing several essential components to be accurate in modern society. With over $60 billion in federal aid tied each year to this guideline, not to mention an additional $260 billion in Medicaid spending, the fact is many Americans are still falling deeper into poverty and failing to receive the aid they so desperately need and deserve5.
If reform of the measure of poverty used by society is an obvious need, it remains to be seen why such reform has not been forthcoming. The answer lies in the very politics that caused the measure to be created in the first place6. Any change in the measured poverty level of a society is an indicator of economic health within that society, and no president has been willing to increase the perceived amount of poverty for a statistical recalculation, no matter how justified7. Indeed, some economists say that updating the poverty measure would increase the number of those considered poor and therefore eligible for government aid, by as much as 2 percentage points. That may not seem significant, but in real terms it means an additional several million people are living below the "poverty line"—whether we count them or not8.
