Defining poverty down

Read enough coverage of the millions of people struggling—and often failing—to make ends meet during the pandemic recession, and it begins to seem like being poor is mostly just finding yourself on the wrong side of a math equation. A headline in The New York Times this week read: “8 Million Have Slipped Into Poverty Since May as Federal Aid Has Dried Up.” At CNN, the same story was framed like this: “More Americans fall into poverty after federal stimulus programs end.”

The language is strangely passive—people slip and fall, The Cut’s Bridget Read pointed out, “as if no one designed this country”—but also insists on movement. According to the Census Bureau, the official poverty rate in 2019 was 10.5 percent, down from 11.8 percent the year before. These numbers have fluctuated throughout the pandemic. By this measure, poverty in the United States is a condition in perpetual motion, a series of good years and bad years as people dance across a line, statistically reborn: poor or not poor.

But where did that 1.3 percent of the population go in 2019 after they, as the language often goes, were lifted out of poverty? And if eight million more people have “slipped” in recent months, the distance from there to here couldn’t have been all that great, right?

As Jen wrote yesterday, official poverty numbers alone have long failed to capture the true extent of the suffering and deprivation created by our current systems. “The official label for the group that doesn’t quite make the poverty cutoff is ‘near poor,’” she explained, “a distinction that I suspect is little comfort to those who might be able to pay their utility bills one month but know they won’t the next.”

The way poverty is officially measured also hasn’t been updated in more than half a century. (The Census Bureau defines the poverty threshold as “three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963.”) This is what Shawn Fremstad of the Center on Economic and Policy Research has called defining “deprivation down over the past fifty-seven years.”

All of this is a choice: how we measure poverty, how our elected officials choose to—or more often not to—address it. “In the current void left by the eternal partisan tug-of-war (not to mention Donald Trump’s wild vacillations) over the fate of a new stimulus package,” Jen wrote, “grasping the extent to which economic hardship has surpassed what the official numbers can demonstrate has taken on a new and unsettling urgency.” As several studies found, the stimulus helped keep a lot of people out of poverty, but not so far out of it that they couldn’t glimpse it over their shoulder. And that’s what we’re seeing now as millions of people go without supplemental unemployment and other pandemic benefits—the short distance from there to here.

Shouldn’t we ask for more? Shouldn’t we raise the bar of these metrics from whatever is just above total misery to something that better reflects what’s necessary for a decent life? People deserve more, after all, than simply not to starve.

—Katie McDonough, deputy editor