Over at the Motherblog, my colleague Dana is giving Jim McDermott simultaneously too much and too little credit in his quest to reform the national poverty measure. While it's true that moving from our hopelessly outdated poverty measure to the more accurate consumption basket developed by the National Academy of Sciences wouldn't actually change the absolute value of the measure much (in part because it counts subsidies and government assistance in its total), it would make it a whole lot more useful. The very act of tying the poverty measure to real world consumption patterns rather than a food basket that made sense in the late-50s would change the discussion over how we measure poverty, and potentially allow for more and better reforms as we try and make the measure more closely reflect life as it's lived. You have to walk before you can run, and moving to the well-respect NAS measure would be a good first step. That said, McDermott isn't walking very fast. His press release suggests his aims are pretty modest. "This new measure would augment, not replace, the current official poverty measurement," he says. "It would therefore not have any direct impact on public program eligibility or on the distribution of Federal funds (any decision to base program eligibility or the distribution of funds on the new modern poverty measure would have to occur on a program-by-program basis)." I guess the idea would be to have the two side-by-side, and ease people into replacing the old measure with the NAS measure. But it's not really clear where the political will for that would come from. (For a bit more on the current poverty measure, see this post.)
