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Political Economy: Drawing a New Line (CQPolitics.com)

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 22:18:39 GMT

Here's a change that everyone should believe in: The federal government, after almost 50 years, is about to alter the way it measures poverty in the United States. It's about time.

The Commerce Department announced this development without much fanfare last week. It was an administrative decision, but it will be profound. And, in theory, we should all benefit.

The state of being impoverished in the 21st century will be better understood, and the people who design government policies to help the poor escape poverty's clutches will be better equipped to do their jobs. As a result, those who are poor may actually see a way out. And the taxpayers who finance anti-poverty efforts may be comforted by an increased awareness of what works, and what doesn't.

This change has been too long in coming. Fifteen years ago, the National Academy of Sciences proposed revisions to the federal government's measure of poverty that was designed in the early 1960s and hasn't been adjusted a whit since. The National Academy's recommendations will form the core of the new poverty measurement, which could have been implemented ages ago. But Congress has dithered with proposals to require a new look at what constitutes poverty, and a succession of administrations have chosen not to act on their own, until now.

The lesson here appears to be that one person can make a difference. That's not a reference to Barack Obama, whose election set this change in motion, but to Rebecca M. Blank, the undersecretary of Commerce for economic affairs. She oversees the Census Bureau, where much of the work counting America's poor takes place. It is that agency that will undertake this revolution in assessing who's impoverished and to what extent, without a legislative mandate to do so.

Rebecca Blank's fingerprints are all over this decision. She is one of those single-minded individuals whose career finally brought her to a place where she could actually practice what she has been teaching for decades.

As a professor at Northwestern University, she wrote a prize-winning book in 1997 promoting a new agenda to fight poverty. She worked for President Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers. For most of the past decade, she was dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan and co-director of the National Poverty Center. She came to the Brookings Institution, where she argued forcefully for efforts to attack poverty, including changing the way we measure it. From there she was tapped by Obama to be the top economic official in the Commerce Department -- and the overseer of the agency most directly charged with identifying America's poor.

It was a fitting appointment. As recently as September 2008, from her perch at Brookings, Blank testified about the current "badly flawed" measure of poverty, and encouraged lawmakers to require the Census Bureau to overhaul it. Now she's in charge and doesn't need Congress. Hurray for people who seize the initiative.

Measure for Measure In a way, Blank is following in the footsteps of the woman who devised the poverty measurement used today. In the early 1960s, a government statistician named Mollie Orshansky decided on her own to try to measure poverty. She came up with a threshold and a way to count income. President Lyndon B. Johnson heard about Orshansky's efforts and in 1964 ordered the government to use her yardstick to set the nation's poverty line.

It was a simple measure -- based on three times what a minimally nutritious diet cost then. When the Census Bureau unveils its new gauge in the fall of 2011, it will incorporate the cost of food, housing, clothes and utilities into the poverty threshold. It's likely to be adjusted geographically based on differing cost-of-living rates across the country.

The current poverty line also just counts cash income. Not so in the future. In assessing whether people can afford that threshold amount, the new measure will reflect the value of in-kind benefits such as food stamps and housing vouchers, and also take into account taxes levied on the working poor. A more precise look at household resources, Blank has argued for years, will make it easier to see where anti-poverty efforts are succeeding and provide a counterpoint to those who argue that they have had little effect.

This new measure won't replace the current poverty line as it is used to determine eligibility for such benefits as Head Start, energy assistance and food stamps -- at least not right away. But that's not a critical flaw. What's more important is to understand what it means to be poor.

Blank testified last fall in one of her first official acts that the poverty rate had risen in 2008 to 13.2 percent, the highest in 11 years -- with 39.8 million people in families with incomes below the poverty line. If the government, in its annual assessment of the state of poverty in the United States, can assert with new authority the line between penury and prosperity, perhaps the country can take new steps to ensure that fewer people fall below it.

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Political Economy: Drawing a New Line (CQPolitics.com)

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