A Small Step in Mayor Bloomberg’s Skirmish on Poverty
I hate it when Mayor Bloombertg does something right. Lucky for me, when, as here, he takes a positive step, he does it in a negative way. So the good news is also the bad news.
As long hinted, Mayor Bloomberg has taken the useful, if somewhat technical, step or implementing for NYC planning purposes a somewhat more realistic definition of “poverty.” Announced by Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs at the annual convention of the NAACP, the new formula will take into account some actual costs of living unlike the previous standard still used by the Federal Government (a jury-rigged, back-of-the envelope calculation accidentally frozen into federal law). The New York Times account is here , the Washington Post's is here and Gail Robinson's Gotham Gazette squib is here. The result of the Bloomberg rejiggering is that there are now, by NYC count, somewhat more poor people and somewhat fewer extremely poor people. (Why? Because the new model counts as income government benefits such as food stamps and Medicaid)The NY Post's amazing take after the jump.
The bad news? As I see it, Mr. Bloomberg continues to fail and refuse to engage with the rest of us. This policy change (which I see as a step forward) has been carried out in typically high-handed Bloomberg-style: handed down as a finished thing without any among the rest of us. As we all know, the devil is in the details and the details of Mr. Bloomberg’s policy shift have not been the subject of public discussion . It’s as though he were our king.
The NY Post railed against the new poverty measure, not because it viewed the method as inaccurate, but because it it didn't like the results the method produced:
The product was New York City's new poverty cut-off: $26,138 a year for a family of two adults and two children - up 27.9 percent from the official federal standard of $20,444.
Fully 2 million people, or 23 percent of city residents, live at or below that figure - which includes the value of income from programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit, food stamps, supplemental feeding programs and housing vouchers.
That's so many people that it would be scary - if the whole concept wasn't so utterly preposterous.
Let's be clear: No family of four could survive for a year in New York City on a total income of $26,138.
The Post editorial writers certainly need a trip to the food pantry; they're the ones with no idea how many manage in NYC.
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poverty | Linda Gibbs | Michael Bloomberg
There is yet another way to measure need which I think is even
Submitted by Daniel Millstone on 14 July 2008 - 11:42pm.
better.
I was introduced to it by a representative of the Women's Center for Education & Career Advancement . Using their self-sufficiency calculator, the WCECA starts out by asking how much a family needs to live on. They add up rent, food, utilities, transport, taxes, day care, health insurance etc. Interestingly , when you add it up a single parent with three children needs $50,000 a year.
Of course very few families have that much. How do they manage? By doing without (health insurance for example), by getting income supplements (like food stamps) and by saving money (two families in an apartment for one).
If we start with a standard of ok living, not one of poverty, we get a much clearer picture in my view of the social and economic changes needed.
When Bloomberg's right...
I rarely commend Mayor Bloomberg, but this time I will. Yes, he managed the news cycle in a ham-handed way, but...
Molly Orshanky's poverty formula is wrong today. When she created the formula in 1963, she based it on the idea that a typical American family spends one-third of its after-tax income on food. She took the cost of the cheapest USDA food plan, tripled it, and called that amount the poverty level. (Note: She actually created 124 separate poverty levels, based on family size and location, but the basic formula is three times the minimum cost of food.)
Today, the CPI only weights food as 16.3% of the total, or just under one-half of Orshansky's formula. (Of course, the CPI's largest component, housing, doesn't use true housing costs but only rental costs, but that's for another discussion.) Food reflects far less of the typical American family's spending than it did 45 years ago. Food costs have risen far less over that time than other costs (until recently, that is). Meanwhile, housing and education costs, which are also vital for people trying to lift themselves out of poverty, have risen far faster. Clearly, the old method for determining poverty levels must change.
So I commend Mayor Bloomberg for forcing this need into the public discussion. Of course, he doesn't seem to like public discussion, preferring instead to dictate terms, but he hasn't been very good at getting his way on that (witness congestion pricing, for example). Meanwhile, the public discussion has begun.