From CAP's new strategy to halve poverty by 2010:
I tend to think the repetition of these numbers is important, as one of the most pernicious myths is that poverty is entirely an African-American, and occasionally an immigrant, problem. In fact, a hefty plurality of the impoverished are white. Can we help them now?
Incidentally, discussions about poverty occasionally get tripped up by the oddness of the federal poverty measure, which isn't particularly related to any working definition of what it means to be poor. At this point, the measure acts as a relatively arbitrary income baseline below which you're judged impoverished. Conservatives make a lot of hay from this fact.
Here's the fun part, though: Just about every alternate measure constructed, including the metric developed by the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that the current poverty limit is woefully inadequate, that a family of four needs more than $19,000 and change to survive, and so increases the number of poor in the country. And then, when you go and ask ordinary Americans how much a family of four requires not to be poor, they tend to offer responses around $40,000 -- only one percent thought $15,000-$20,0000 was sufficient. So you can quibble with the poverty measure, but be warned: Just about all the data we have suggests that it understates, rather than overstates, the plight of the poor.
