Poverty Measurement – Wisconsin

Posted on September 2, 2010 by townsend

• 11% of Wisconsin residents live in poverty, By Bill Glauber, September 1, 2010, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “More than 11% of Wisconsin’s residents – including one in seven children – lived in poverty in 2008, according to the second Wisconsin Poverty Report. Authors of the report, to be published Thursday, said they created a new Wisconsin-specific measure of poverty. ‘There are a lot of forces that can push poverty up or down,’ said Timothy M. Smeeding of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Institute for Research on Poverty, which produced the report. ‘This is a new poverty threshold that better reflects the cost of living in Wisconsin,’ Smeeding said. The new measure set the Wisconsin poverty line of $24,842 for a family of four. That figure was well above the official U.S. poverty line of $21,834 for a family of four. The overall poverty rate was slightly increased using the Wisconsin-specific measure…”
• State poverty rate worsens, By Mike Ivey, September 2, 2010, Madison Capital Times: “No surprise here but Wisconsin’s poverty rate worsened in 2008, with more than 11 percent of the state’s population living in need, including one in seven children and one in 10 elderly residents, according to a new report. Produced by the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) at the UW-Madison, the report issued Thursday used direct interviews and a more complete accounting of the state poverty rate than traditional measures. Under that matrix, the state poverty rate was 11.2 percent vs. 10.2 percent according to the U.S. government figures. The national poverty rate in 2008 was 13.2 percent. ‘This 11 percent number in Wisconsin more accurately reflects what people told us,’ says Tim Smeeding, director of the IRP and La Follette School of Public Affairs faculty member. Milwaukee County was the poorest in the state, with a poverty rate of 18.8 percent, according to the IRP report. La Crosse (13.9%) and Dane (13.1%) percent were next poorest…”