- Nashville’s fight for the poor could get help from new definition of poverty, By Janell Ross, March 24, 2010, The Tennessean: “Roslyn Burdett gets five children off to school before she starts her Baptist Hospital phone operator job at 7 a.m. It’s a tough scramble, but it beats being unemployed and living in a housing project. And she’d have never been able to make the change without Bethlehem Centers of Nashville, a nonprofit agency whose before- and after-school programs are the linchpin of her schedule. ‘I have to have a safe place to leave my children so that I can be at work at the time I have to be there,’ said Burdett, a single parent. Bethlehem’s programs are open only to impoverished families, the kind who would otherwise struggle to pay for child care. For decades, American poverty has been defined by an eight-line chart comparing family size with annual income. A family of four that earned $22,050 last year qualified for all sorts of programs. With a dollar more, they didn’t. But the Obama administration’s stance is that poverty isn’t so simple, and it announced this month that it will redefine the term by including expenses such as housing and health care – which vary from place to place – plus the value of tax credits and other government help…”
- Who is really poor in America?, Editorial, April 4, 2010, The Tennessean: “It’s an understatement, but a lot has changed across America during the past 50 years. For example, compare how the skylines in Nashville or Atlanta looked in 1960 with the way they look today. Consider that in 1960 we paid about 31 cents a gallon for gasoline, whereas we now pay more than $2.50. And if that’s not enough change for you, look at how the nation’s suburbs have exploded since John F. Kennedy was elected president of the United States. One thing that hasn’t changed, though, is the way we measure poverty in the United States. Starting in the mid-1960s, the federal government began gauging poverty based on an eight-line chart comparing family size with annual income. Today that way of measuring still stands, despite huge changes in the way Americans live…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty