The new Obama poverty measure fails. It flunks the test of political neutrality and is based on misleading statistics that not one American in 100,000 could possibly understand, says columnist Robert J. Samuelson.
That’s because the new calculation would measure poverty on a sliding scale. Thus, if the average income of families in the United States increases so too does the poverty threshold. Talk about keeping up with the Jones. This new measure provides the perfect climate for left-leaning politicians to promote equalization of wealth through redistribution. The measure would bump poverty up 30 percent: more poverty equals more political fodder to argue for increased welfare.
Unfortunately, the method currently used to calculate the poverty rate is already skewed, creating a “crisis” of poverty in the United States:
- This is because only a family’s pretax income is included in total income when determining their poverty level.
- Thus, despite the fact that the average poor household receives $28,000 dollars in welfare benefits annually, these benefits are not included in their income.
- Not surprisingly then, even though the United States has increased welfare spending by thirteen-fold (adjusting for inflation) since the war on poverty began in 1965, the poverty rate has stayed much the same. http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=19436&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=DPD
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