partial text of Matthew 25

Poverty

An Introduction

By Fred Kammer, SJ

Poverty is one of the three focus areas for the work of JSRI. In their 1986 book-length pastoral letter Economic Justice for All the US Bishops reminded us of the importance of confronting poverty in these words:

 Dealing with poverty is not a luxury to which our nation can attend when it finds the time and resources. Rather, it is a moral imperative of the highest priority.[1]

 But what does it mean to speak of poverty in the United States? Drawing on the tradition of Catholic Social Teaching, the bishops explained it this way, “By poverty, we are referring here to the lack of sufficient material resources required for a decent life.”[2] Then, in the next sentence, they acknowledge the complexity of the question, “We use the government’s definition of poverty, although we recognize its limits.” And a footnote introduces elements of the national debate about what we call “the poverty line.”

 

Measuring Poverty

The current poverty line measure was developed in the Social Security Administration in the early 1960s by research analyst Mollie Orshansky. It was based on surveys in the prior decade regarding American families and their food consumption. The poverty level was set at three times a subsistence food budget, based on the experience that families at that time spent one-third of their income on food. The poverty line is still calculated on that basis and adjusted for family size. The 2011 measure is $22,350 dollars for a family of four.

In four decades, however, food costs have declined dramatically as a percentage of the average family budget, now being only 17%.[3] Other costs such as child care, housing, health care, education, and transportation now consume a much larger part of the average family budget. Additional factors also have contributed to debate about the official poverty line: it only considers actual cash income, not other resources such as food stamps/SNAP, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), housing subsidies, and a variety of federal and state health programs; and it does not reflect the variations in cost-of-living, especially housing costs, across the country.

In the early 1990s, Congress asked the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to tackle the question of the adequacy of the Orshansky standard (which she herself questioned). Based on the work of an expert panel, NAS released recommendations for a new measure in 1995. Those recommendations included:

  1. a new poverty threshold based on median spending by a family of four on food and clothing and shelter, and a multiplier to reflect other family needs; this too is then adjusted for family size;

  2. an income definition that includes cash (after taxes), tax credits, and in-kind benefits, but subtracts expenses such as child care that reduce available family income;

  3. subtraction of medical out-of-pocket spending (MOOP) from income; and

  4. adjustment of the poverty threshold to reflect the significant disparity in living costs across various regions attributable to differences in the cost of housing and utilities.

In 2009, legislation was introduced in both houses of Congress—the Measuring American Poverty (MAP) Act of 2009—to require the Census Bureau to develop a modern poverty measure. Some states and cities also are looking at measures of poverty for their populations.

Read more: Part II: Applying the NAS standards to the Gulf South States.

                    Part III: A New Paradigm: The Human Development Index—Looking at the Gulf South

 

[1] National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Economic Justice for All, 1986, no. 170.

[2] Ibid, no. 173.

[3] Dorothy Smith, Center for Law and Social Policy, Measure by Measure: The Current Poverty Measure v. the National Academy of Sciences Measures, November, 2009, p. 1.

 View all Poverty articles »

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