Map of estimated poverty rates in the United States, 2008.Legend: Light Red <5%; Dark Red >40%.
” Let’s redefine poverty!” This appears to be the mantra of the Obama administration that is looking to not enhance, but redefine, the notion and current measures of poverty. In summary, Robert Samuelson’s article “why our poverty measure misleads” helps outline the problem of poverty measures currently used before addressing the propaganda nature of the new poverty measure proposed by the Obama Administration. The current poverty measure in the US is a threshold, if you earn less then “X” then you are poor. The problem with this one dimensional definition is that it fails to account for poverty relief measures such as food stamps, tax cuts, etc. that help improve the living standards of the bottom in relation to the rest of the population, hence, the definition offers a rather skewed measure of what real poverty actually is. On the new proposed statistical measure of poverty, Samuelson makes the point, that it would simply turn a fixed poverty line (which is annually adjusted for inflation) into a variable measure always associated with the bottom quintile of society. This new definition poses a modern paradox–is it possible to not have a bottom 20% of society? In any free society, the short answer to this question is–NO. When proposed with such an absurd measure that does in no way seem to improve the current measure of poverty, but rather to inflate it, one need to ask questions about alternative motives, i.e. is there something other than measure enhancements that we are looking at here? Samuelson seems to think this is the case. With the new measure current poverty would dramatically increase allowing the Obama administration more propaganda power to further expand the reach of government.
Einstein once said: “we need to make things as simple as possible, but no simpler.” With the new measure of poverty the administration is proposing to, simply put, disobey this maxim and promote complexity and confusion. Whenever this is observed to be the case we are left entitled to ask questions and be on our look out for hidden agendas in Washington.
To read R. Samuelson’s article in full, click here.
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