The flaws built into the Census Bureau's official estimates of poverty in the United States never have been a secret. Specialists in the economics of poverty — non-profit service organizations, public service officials, academics, statisticians, even the Census Bureau itself — recognized the inadequacies of the oversimplified estimates almost from the moment they were developed in the 1960s.
But on Monday, the bureau released a report describing a new Supplemental Poverty Measure that addresses many of the longstanding imperfections in the official estimates.
On the income side, the new measurement adds the value of non-cash benefits that individuals and families may receive: the Earned Income Tax Credit, unemployment insurance and food stamps, for example.
On the cost side, it now includes such necessary expenses as rent and/or mortgage payments, transportation to and from work, employment-related child care costs, medicines and medical insurance co-pays and deductibles.
Until now, the Census Bureau's official poverty estimates — the most recent came out in September — have been the only official basis for gauging the nature and extent of poverty in our country. They also have been — and continue to be — the basis for calculating eligibility for various government anti-poverty services.
But the figures are only a snapshot notion of poverty based only on cash income sources and the cost of essential groceries. Left out are key factors that affect how people and families actually live and survive: paying for housing, health care and transportation and staying afloat despite lower-paying — or lost — jobs, thanks to such support programs as food stamps and tax credits.
The Census Bureau calls the new supplemental measure "a work in progress," as it should be, and researchers already are pointing to areas that need tweaking.
Still, the supplemental measure already is providing a fuller, more nuanced and more useful picture of which Americans are living in poverty or are close to impoverishment and how poverty is distributed regionally and, within those regions, the rates at which people of different ages and different ethnic backgrounds experience poverty and so on.
It appears, for example, that many more older Americans are living in poverty than the official figures had indicated. Even after counting the value and benefits of Medicare coverage, the out-of-pocket costs of health care for older Americans still are so enormous that they devour income and drive 15.9 percent of American seniors — 6.2 million people — into poverty. That's almost 3 million more than September's official numbers estimated.
The new supplemental measure gives us a clearer picture of American poverty. It demonstrates the undeniable effectiveness of a wide range of anti-poverty programs. Both should give pause to Congress' Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, the so-called super committee, which has 15 days left to devise a detailed plan to bring stability and sustainability to the U.S. federal budget. Cuts that go too far and come too fast will inflict real and immediate real damage to American families all over the country.
Indeed, the most important numbers in the Census Bureau's Monday report may be those squeezed into the tiny type of Table 5 on page 12. The table applies the new supplemental criteria to 2009 and 2010 and tracks the two-year trend.
It should come as no surprise that the trend, according to nearly three dozen different standards, shows that poverty in America continues to get worse.
