Supplemental Poverty Measure

Posted on May 14, 2010 by townsend

• A rich new poverty measure, By Nancy Folbre, May 10, 2010, New York Times: “The Census Bureau recently announced plans to develop a new Supplemental Poverty Measure (S.P.M.), also referred to as a Supplemental Income Poverty Measure (SIPM). If you want to remember the acronym, imagine a phone app that allows you to sip virtual coffee that increases your alertness to technical issues of poverty measurement. Poverty researchers like me will not require this imaginary app, as we are already overexcited. Most of us dislike the official poverty lines used to determine who, exactly, qualifies as poor. Most of us can recite at least five reasons why these measures (based on a mid-1960s assessment of the costs of a minimal food budget) are narrow, out of date and downright misleading. Most of us can also expound on how current methods of measuring poverty make it difficult, if not impossible, to accurately assess the impact of anti-poverty policies. Food assistance administered through the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) has been a mainstay of our safety net during the current recession. But since food stamps are not income, they don’t show up in our income-based poverty measures. The Earned Income Tax Credit (E.I.T.C.) is our largest cash-assistance program other than unemployment insurance in this recession. Our poverty measures are based on pre-tax, rather than after-tax, income. So, by definition, the E.I.T.C. does not reduce poverty. It’s hard to find anyone more passionate about these inconsistencies than Professor Timothy Smeeding, current director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin. He wrote his doctoral dissertation in 1975 on the importance of developing measures of post-benefit, post-tax income to better inform public policy…”
• Reaction mixed on proposed poverty measure, By Cheryl Wetzstein, May 14, 2010, Washington Times: “The Census Bureau’s formal release of an alternative way to measure poverty in the United States is 16 months away, but the rumblings of unease can already be heard about the politically sensitive indicator. The bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), which will be released September 2011, is ‘a bogus and dishonest propaganda device,’ Robert Rector, senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, told a Brookings Institution briefing recently. ‘It’s a Trojan horse,’ introduced under the name of poverty, but designed to find endless ‘income inequality’ that must be fixed with even more spending on anti-poverty programs, Mr. Rector said. The government will spend $900 billion on means-tested aid to poor and low-income persons this year alone, he added. Policy experts have been working for at least 15 years on a new poverty standard to supplement – or eventually replace – the measure that has been used since the 1960s, a measure that many critics say does not reflect contemporary realities and needs. The problem: some experts think the current measure overstates the number of poor Americans, while another group argues it vastly understates the number…”