Right. The argument about whether the poverty measure is an accurate measure of poverty is an interesting one (though it's worth saying that the alternate measure developed by the National Academy of Sciences returned a higher poverty estimate, and when you poll Americans on how much nmoney a family needs, they give way high responses), but it's not super important. The current poverty measure tracks how many people live below a somewhat arbitrary, but certainly quite low, yearly income. When that number is bigger, it means more people making very little money. Whether this is a precise definition of what we want to call "poverty," rather than "very low yearly income," is interesting, but not relevant to the trend lines. If you are interested in this argument, though, John Cassidy wrote a great article on the poverty measure for The New Yorker that's worth reading.
