More on definitions of poverty

The posting I had on “definitions of poor” had several interesting return comments that are worth considering. Let me quote parts of them. The various paragraphs are from different people.

Poor is also relative. Sometimes what is seen as poor in the USA would be seen as not so poor to the refugee who has fled with the clothes on his back and nothing else. My children shopped at Goodwill for school clothes at more than one time in our lives, but we did not see ourselves as poor and we always had something to give to someone who maybe could not even shop at Goodwill. My father was orphaned at a young age and his brother at 18 had the responsibility of raising his 3 younger brothers and sisters. They had very little, but my uncle worked in a grocery store and in the depression in the south, they always had food. They did not see themselves as poor when compared to folks with no food at all. …

One can and should be grateful for what one has (it could always be worse) while yet, at the same time, being soberly aware of the inadequacies of one’s situation (if one is, for example, on the verge of homelessness) and especially, the situation of one’s neighbor or, if health is an issue, even one’s spouse. That is what is particularly distressing about all this: the manifest lack of compassion for, and hostility toward, OTHERS so often on display by the likes of Mr. Cain and his spiritual kindred. …

The Bible doesn’t provide a clear definition of “poor”, which I think could be so that we, as Christians, don’t look for an excuse to not help someone because they aren’t “really” poor. The relative measure of poverty is something I’ve seen and heard some American Christians us to say that a person in America isn’t poor. So even if that person barely made four digits of income each year for two years while looking for work that person “isn’t” really poor. …

I think a lot of folks who don’t have very much would say that they are “not really poor.” A good friend who has not always had what he has now, I first met when he was living in a dumpster and he did not consider himself poor because his dumpster was clean and didn’t leak in the rain. In fact, I have said that I was not really poor when I didn’t have very much. Having spent some time in the inner city in DC, I met lots of folks who didn’t have much, but they didn’t consider themselves poor as they always had something to share–even if it was rice and beans. No shoes vs no feet– …

What makes the above comments an excellent set of comments is that it brings up a very important subject, and that is the definition of poverty. It also brings up the point that the perception of poverty can be relative. Thus, a person living in the USA within the poverty level can feel themselves to not really be poor. But, that does not solve the problem of the first part, which is the definition of poverty. So, how is the poverty line for this country calculated?

In 1963-1964, Molly Orshansky of the Social Security Administration developed poverty thresholds. Orshansky based her poverty thresholds on the “thrifty food plan,” which was the cheapest of four food plans developed by the Department of Agriculture. The food plan was “designed for temporary or emergency use when funds are low,” according to the USDA. Based on the 1955 Household Food Consumption Survey from the USDA (the latest available survey at the time), Orshansky knew that families of three or more persons spent about one third of their after-tax income on food. She then multiplied the cost of the USDA economy food plan by three to arrive at the minimal yearly income a family would need. Using 1963 as a base year, she calculated that a family of four, two adults and two children would spend $1,033 for food per year. Using her formula based on the 1955 survey, she arrived at $3,100 a year ($1,033 x3) as the poverty threshold for a family of four in 1963.

Orshansky differentiated her thresholds not only by family size, but also by farm/non-farm status, by the number of family members who were children, gender of the head of household, and by aged/non-aged status. The result was a detailed matrix of 124 poverty thresholds. Generally, the figures cited were weighted average thresholds for each family size.

To this day the definition of the poverty threshold remains the same, but is simply updated for changing costs. In 2009, the USA poverty threshold for a single person was $11,161 while the poverty threshold for a family of four was $21,756. Under this measure, the poverty rate for the USA in 2010 was 15.1%. That is, 15.1% of the population of the USA lived under the poverty threshold last year. Now, please notice that the measure of poverty is based on an actual medical measure of minimum food consumed sufficient to maintain health coupled with the idea that food should only consume 1/3 of your budget at maximum. There are several current objections to even this guideline.

The most common current objection is that poor people in the USA have significantly more than poor people in other countries. However, I see several problems with this argument:

• I have known poor people in two Third World countries. I have also buried their children who died because of poor nutrition. I have helped them buy medicines for their children because they were infested with parasites. When food expenditures rise much more than 1/3 of the budget, other, many times essential, expenditures are ignored or decreased.
• Sadly, things like expensive health insurance go by the board. If you are unfortunate enough to work several part time jobs in order to earn $21,756 for your family, then you do not have company subsidized health insurance and you cannot afford the typical cost of family health insurance, which is about $1,200. You can get cheaper insurance with a higher deductible for lower than that, but you have a much higher chance of ending up in deep debt. Generally the cheaper health insurance gives so little that it is not worth the loss of monthly income to get it. And, yes, when I was working several part-time jobs I had to research that so I do know.
• An interestingly sad argument is the one that says that if someone has a TV, etc., then one is not really poor. However, I can tell you out of personal experience that even in the poorest of Third World countries, almost everyone has a TV or at least a radio. More than that, there is a particularly nasty streak in some of those objections. If carried out to the fullest, it means that the children of the poor should have no access to those things that would allow them to end up in a better state than their parents. More than that, there is a certain pettiness in that approach. It argues that being poor means that one should have no TV, no radio, nothing other than the bare essentials necessary to maintain life. Again, this would also mean that the children of the poor would be so far behind the rest of the culture that we would be in danger of creating an underclass of adults who are always out of the mainstream society. More than that, given my personal experience in Third World countries, it is an argument that does not deal with the reality of human existence, which is that bare existence is not sufficient or satisfactory. While such a life might have been the life of a poor family in other centuries, this world no longer lives in those centuries.