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U.S. poverty line seen as poor indicator
Mark Stephen Moore eats a free lunch at the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen in New York City. In April, the kitchen was serving 1,100 meals each weekday, the most it had ever served, due to rising food prices and a slowing economy.
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KAI RYSSDAL: Last year the government told us that a little more than 12 percent of all Americans were officially impoverished. More than 36 million people were living at or below the poverty line. Tomorrow, the Census Bureau's going to update the number for 2007. With the economy slowing, there's a chance the number's bumped up a bit. We think of government figures like this one as being pretty precise. But, as Marketplace's Steve Henn explains, there's actually a big debate about what that federal poverty line really measures.
STEVE HENN: In 1969, a Census Bureau economist defined poverty as the minimum a family could spend on a balanced diet for a year and multiplied that by three. If you earned less, you were poor.
Forty years later, food makes up just one-seventh of the average family budget but the poverty threshold in the United States is still calculated pretty much the same way.
Michael Laracy: The numbers that we are using no longer reflect reality.
Michael Laracy is at the Annie E Casey foundation. He says childcare, housing and transportation are all essentials for working families but the costs of these things don't figure in the poverty rate.
Laracy: We are constantly misjudging who is poor because the number is so out of date.
The federal poverty threshold also doesn't include food stamps or other aid programs as income. Ron Haskins at the Brookings Institution says fighting poverty that way is like groping through a cluttered room in the dark.
RON HASKINS: So when we make food stamps more generous as we did in 2002, it has no effect on the poverty rate because these things are ignored in calculating poverty.
Earlier this year New York created its own poverty line. Here's Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Linda Gibbs:
Linda Gibbs: We wanted a measure that would tell us whether or not what we were doing actually worked or not.
New York's poverty threshold counts aid programs and housing. When the city recalculated its poverty line, the rate ticked up slightly, fell for families with kids, but poverty among seniors increased.
Gibbs says these results are already affecting policy debates.
In Washington, I'm Steve Henn for Marketplace.
When I was 11 we fled from Hitler who that year had taken Austria in his Anschluß. Our experiences there have been crucial in what I am. The few who survived and whom I know feel like I:"there is something in the whole athmosphere of America which very much reminds one of Austrofascism and even of Hitler's paradise". The crucial question (one that may never be fully answered but which we must attempt to address) is what should and would could the international community do about this. The past, in this is not exactly encouraging. Both the Évian and the Bermuda conferences (set up to try and help the refugee problem) where a possibility for the delegates from around the world to hold stirring speeches, go hiking (Évian), swimming, boating and playing golf at that conference suggest that the other states should do something but they were so sorry, they could not themselves do more. This is precisely what we have done since and the frequent "ethnic cleansings" and other state murders. One of the points, I would suggest, is that at some points affairs are not national. With the world as it is, such things more than disturb the international community---the same reason initially, to make laws in the various states: "to promote the king's peace"---or peace of the realms." I shall use an analogy: parents do not own their children. They merely have been left to the parents to rear. Whether I dress my children one way or another and whether I set a time for when they must be home is my affair. When, however, I maltreat my children it becomes a communal concern. It is no different in states. When states erect concentration camps, suppress minorities or arbitrarily remove their citizenship and their rights when they had not committed an offense becomes an international program.
To deal with such issues we need a UN which certainly is more equitably constructed then now, with the veto power greatly diminished or even abolished and a fair representation of the various states. Such a UN must be sufficiently armed to make decisions which can be enforced by a military derived from all states and absolved on their Oath to their country but rather who have been given an Oath by the UN. The military has to be strong enough to stand up to any nation or combination of nations. Perhaps it ought to be the only one with nuclear weapons.
It was esactly what Hitler wanted: to show the world that really no one was particularly eager to help the Je´ws caught in Nazi Germany.
Above all we need a world-view in which we all feel that we are living in a hiuman community, with equal rights and with a better distribution of wealth than we now have.
Dr. Erich H. Loewy
Prof & Fd'g Chair Bioethics (emeritus)
University of CA, Davis
ehloewy@ucdavis.edu
Our problem in the U.S. is that we no longer a democracy. John Dewey long ago wrote that Political Democracy is meaningles and perhaps even damgerous unless underpinned by (1) personal democracy---the willingness to debate such questions with orhers, to be ready to be persuaded that one is hardlöy ever completely right, etc. (2) Oeconomic (he called it industrial) democracy--which means that when possible all can make a decemt living (at the present 25% of our work force earn $ 8.50/hour, the gap between enormously rich and grandingly poor is constantly widening) and (3) educational democracy where all who are able can optimize their skills and pursue their interests. I would add Roosevelts Freedom from Fear and Freedom
from want.
I would also suggest reading "The Decent Society" by AmishaiMikolic (sp.). His book makes a very good argument for having a state try to disparage the population or parts of them. Bein poor is disparaging, not being able to afford to see your doctor or dentist is disparaging and poverty as well as crass differences in income is disparaging.
At this time and in this country we have raised autonomy to be the greatest good, and allowed the poverty stricken to continue without any real help to them.
Dr. Erich H. Loewy
Professor and F'dg Chair Bioethics (emeritus)
U of CA, Davis
ehloewy@ucdavis.edu
