sticking with the subway handout theme

[mvak]

So J got me digging around trying to figure out exactly how "poverty" is defined.

As far as I can tell, the answer is: in 1963, a Social Security statistician (Mollie Orshanky) took the Agriculture Department's estimate of the amount of money needed to feed a family on a very economical dietary plan, and multiplied by three.  This number was the

Comments

[mvak]

No worries, I've gotten in some pretty ugly legal fights based entirely on knowledge (on my side) gleaned from Law and Order.

I see what you're saying though, and it does make sense in a way. Any discontinuous jump in the definition would be a major headache for both of those reasons, but only temporarily, which is of course all that seems to count politically.

It would be nice if they used the same essential measure ("can you buy food"), just rescaled to food prices for today...

[gaius_marius]

One of the ways they deal with this without acknowledging it is that they will make benefits available for up to X times the poverty level, making the level itself less important (I can't remember which things do this). Also, conservatives would counter argue that poverty-related benefits like food stamps aren't counted as income for assessing the ultimate poverty, and that our current method inflates the figure. Of course, when one side of the debate doesn't acknowledge that you can work hard and still not get ahead, I'm not sure what help measurements are anyway.

I'm looking at what classes to sign up for for next year; maybe I'll look into a poverty law one since I've done all of my specific requirements.