JFCS Programs
|
Events
|
|
Sign-up here to receive our monthly newsletter, filled with valuable community information.
|
Donations
JFCS appreciates your donations to help us help our community.
|
|
|
|
|
Emergency Aid News
Measuring Income and Poverty in the United States
National Center for Children in Poverty
By: Nancy K. Cauthen and Sarah Fass
April 2007
This fact sheet discusses how the U.S. government measures poverty, why the current measure is inadequate, and what alternative ways exist to measure economic hardship.
How does the United States measure poverty?
Most measures of poverty, in the U.S. and elsewhere, focus narrowly on income rather than including other aspects of economic status, such as assets or debt. Income poverty is measured by one of two standards – "absolute" or "relative" measures. Absolute measures of poverty – like the official U.S. measure – set an income threshold below which an individual or family is considered to be poor, regardless of general living standards. Relative measures typically set the poverty level at a percent of median income and therefore vary with the economic fortunes of the population as a whole.
The U.S. measures poverty by a standard developed more than 40 years ago, when data indicated that families spent about one-third of their income on food. The official poverty level was set by multiplying food costs by three. Since then, the same figure has been updated annually for inflation but otherwise remained unchanged. The federal poverty level is adjusted to family size but is the same across the continental U.S.
Read More Here
|
|
|
