[samtheman]

Can't they just redefine poverty to make Bush look bad? How hard is that?

[Army Air Corps]

It is easy for them. Look at the graph. If you think like a Dem, you will pick the lowest point on the graph, the early 1970s, and ignore everything beforehand. Then, you scream that poverty is higher than the seventies with the tacit implication that the seventies were bad and that we are doing worse now.

[ancient_geezer]

Can't they just redefine poverty to make Bush look bad? How hard is that?

Not very easily, too many competing interests are rooted in how it is calculated. The methodology is pretty much set in rock by court cases fighting over the impacts to government programs, benefits, and economic reports from attempted changes to it.

The federal version of the povertyline/threshold is calculated by the census bureau and published in the Federal Register each year.

Read this for more than you would ever want to know about the poverty measure and its history.

http://www.census.gov/hhes/poverty/povmeas/papers/orshansky.html

From there they determine howmany folk lay below that threshold for the proverty census.