Free Republic

There are three ways of defining poverty in America: the official Census Bureau method, which uses a set of income thresholds that vary by family size and composition; an experimental income-based method called the Supplemental Poverty Measure that factors in government programs designed to help people with low incomes; and a consumption-based method that measures what households actually spend. By defining poverty according to different criteria, these three methods capture surprisingly different populations of men, women and children. In a perfect world, these three methods would all tell us to do the same thing to alleviate poverty, but it’s not...

New Yorkers can be forgiven for shock at the newspaper headlines last week informing them that millions more of them were “near poor” or “low income.” They might relax a bit on learning that the “root cause” is simply new definition of poverty from the Census Bureau. Indeed, under the Census definition, a family in New York City is “near poor” if it has full medical insurance and an annual income below $77,000. (In Oakland, Calif., the figure is $88,000!) The Census report actually put nearly half the US population as “low income” — and news stories typically implied the...