Invisible Americans by Jeff Madrick

Author:Jeff Madrick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-01-27T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

HARDSHIP AND POVERTY

The mismeasurement of poverty in America is deliberate. That fact is not lost on government experts. As Denton Vaughan, a respected Social Security analyst, has put it: “Updating the statistical measure of poverty would tend to change our view of the size of the poverty population and thus affect our sense of the possible claim which poverty reduction, as a policy goal, has on national resources. As there are very powerful forces arrayed on each side of the poverty debate, the resulting political sensitivity of the poverty issue has very obviously contributed to the difficulty of modifying the current measure.”

What would it take to measure poverty fairly in America?

The problems of the current measures of poverty—official and supplemental—are manifold. For example, a simple income poverty line is inadequate in telling us how children live in families making less than that line. Even if we measured poverty more accurately, we would still need to know more about how far below the poverty line most poor children fall. While the Census Bureau regularly reports the number of children in deep poverty, this tells us precious little. In 2017, 8 percent of children—almost 6 million, based on the OPM—lived in families below half of the poverty line.

Under the supplemental measure, tax credits and benefits such as SNAP, school lunches, and housing benefits raise some very poor children out of deep poverty, but they typically remain under the poverty line even so, making them subject to serious disadvantages. Only some 4.8 percent of children are in deep poverty under the SPM, a fact much applauded without sufficiently considering that so many children are poor according to a measure that is too low.

Earlier, we looked at a handful of examples of how children live in poverty. Now we will more comprehensively examine the daunting hardship poor children must bear in order to give a fuller picture of living in poverty.

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