Your editorial (“Feds have a poor way of defining poverty,” Dec. 27) contains a host of inaccuracies:

First and foremost, the new Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) is a work in progress. According to the Census Bureau it “will not replace the official poverty measure and will not be used to determine eligibility for government programs.”

The SPM is an experimental measure based on extensive research conducted since 1995, that reflects the income necessary for a family to make ends meet – pay for basic necessities – and factors in geographic differences in the cost of housing.

You lumped “near poor” – a term the Census does not even use (more shock value?) – into your criticism of the SPM. “Near poor” generally refers to families with incomes from 100-200 percent of poverty. Families at the income levels you highlighted ($89,700 for a family of four in Oakland; $80,000 in Washington, D.C.) would not qualify for Medicaid or SNAP (food stamps) even if a new poverty measure were adopted.

The 2011 poverty line ($11,139 for an individual, $22,314 for a family of four) is still the baseline for determining eligibility for programs such as Medicaid and SNAP (food stamps). There has been no federal expansion of the eligibility limits for these critical forms of assistance that help families facing hard times.

The increased use of these supports, and therefore the expenditures you cite, is largely a result of the sluggish economy and the lack of jobs paying family-sustaining wages.

Before drawing conclusions about the development of a new formula to measure poverty one should consider the following facts:

Economists have long criticized the “official” poverty rate as inadequate. The current measure is based on a 1960s premise that an average family spends one-third of its income on food. Family spending on food has shrunk to a much smaller share (close to one-seventh), in part due to the rising costs of other expenses – housing, utilities, out-of-pocket medical care, child care, commuting – none of which are reflected in the “official” poverty rate.

The current formula does not consider the value of non-cash government aid, food stamps and tax credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) when calculating income. The new Supplemental Poverty Measure does include these supports.

No doubt there will continue to be much debate over the proper way to calculate an accurate, current-day poverty measure. But rest assured, costs have grown enormously since the sixties; ask any of the 64 percent of mothers in the workforce with children under age six if today’s child care costs take up a much larger portion of family income than when Kennedy was president.

Editors, and the readers they inform, are entitled to their own opinions. But they are not entitled to their own facts.

DelCo Times – January 12, 2012 – 在线阅读文章