•Press Release Government Health and Social Programs United States
Washington, DC ― The Office of Management and Budget’s announcement that it is seeking comment on ways to improve official measurements of poverty “offers an important opportunity to tell the government to adopt a modern poverty measure that reflects what it really takes to make ends meet in today’s economy,” the Center for Economic and Policy Research’s Shawn Fremstad writes in a new post.
Both the Official Poverty Measure (OPM) and the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) use “outdated” poverty thresholds that do not reflect either public consensus or expert opinion as to how much income Americans need to stay out of poverty, Fremstad writes.
Fremstad suggests one alternative poverty measure could “[set] the poverty threshold equal to 60 percent of median equivalized disposable income, the same threshold the United Kingdom currently uses as its main poverty measure.” This would put the poverty line at $44,000 a year for a family of four, compared to the OPM’s poverty threshold of $25,465 and the SPM’s of $28,166.
Fremstad lists a number of other factors that could be considered in determining the poverty threshold, including value of health insurance and out-of-pocket spending on health care, transportation, and child care; value of education; survey misreporting; whether student loan and other mandatory debt should be subtracted from income; costs of disability and social care; and how to ensure certain poor or near-poor constituencies, such as the homeless, are included in poverty counts.
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