Who’s poor? Depends how you measure it, By Amy Crawford, March 1, 2015, Boston Globe: “As Mitt Romney flirted with the idea of a third presidential run in January, the former Massachusetts governor called for a new war on poverty in America. Romney’s remarks, which briefly got both parties talking about the issue, were surprising not only because he had drawn flak during his 2012 campaign for claiming that he was ‘not concerned about the very poor,’ but also because American political discourse has always focused more on the frustrations of the middle class than the struggles of the least fortunate. One reason politicians target their appeals to people in the middle of the socioeconomic scale is pragmatic: They are more likely to vote than those at the bottom. But it’s also because poverty is a particularly intractable and confounding problem. As a culture, we’re not sure how to explain who ends up in poverty—whether they’re disadvantaged by the system, lazy, or just unlucky. In fact, we can’t even agree on what poverty means…”
Tag: Official Poverty Measure
EITC and Poverty Measurement
Everyone’s favorite anti-poverty program doesn’t reduce the poverty rate, By Dylan Matthews, July 29, 2014, Vox: “As we mentioned during the rollout of Paul Ryan’s poverty plan last week, expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit is one of the few anti-poverty measures both parties can agree about (even if they can’t come to an agreement on how to fund it). But at the same time, the EITC does exactly nothing to reduce the official poverty rate. The reason has nothing to do with the effectiveness of the policy — the best evidence we have is that the EITC improves health, school achievement in children of recipient households, and those children’s wages once they grow up, among other things. It has to do entirely with what is and isn’t included in the official poverty numbers. . .”