Team O’s ‘poor’ trick Playing games on poverty

New Yorkers can be forgiven for shock at the newspaper headlines last week informing them that millions more of them were “near poor” or “low income.” They might relax a bit on learning that the “root cause” is simply new definition of poverty from the Census Bureau.

Indeed, under the Census definition, a family in New York City is “near poor” if it has full medical insurance and an annual income below $77,000. (In Oakland, Calif., the figure is $88,000!)

The Census report actually put nearly half the US population as “low income” — and news stories typically implied the startling new number was the result of sharply deteriorating economic conditions.

Huh? The city has plenty of needy, like these lining up for free milk — but the new definition of “near poor” covers New Yorkers earning up to $77,000.
In fact, it was a surreptitious and dubious shift by the Obama administration, setting the “near-poverty” income level very close to the median-household income in most communities. (“Median income” is the point at which half the households have more income, and half have less.)

Thus, it was foreordained that, using this new standard, the Census folks “discovered” that almost half the population is living in “near-poverty” conditions. That is, if you define “near poverty” as an income roughly equal to the median, that means that by definition nearly half the population will always be “poor” or “near poor” — regardless of any changes in actual living standards.

Obama’s new poverty measure will produce very odd results. For example, if the real income of every single American were to magically double overnight, the new measure would show no drop in poverty or “near poverty,” because the poverty- and near-poverty income thresholds would also double.

In other words, the president has introduced a statistical trick that gives new meaning to the saying that “the poor will always be with you.”

The shift seems designed to promote Obama’s obsession to “spread the wealth.” By suggesting that many more Americans are poor or near-poor, the Census generates political pressure to raise taxes and expand the welfare state. Read the rest at The New York Post