>Not flawed, exactly, but incomplete. It speaks to the distribution
>of market income, and forgets that we do have a feeble and
>anemic--but effective (even if in some ways less effective than it
>used to be)--social insurance state.
You mean the EITC? But, as the article went on to say, the poverty definition also excludes payroll (and sales) taxes. And as the article didn't say, the poverty line is an absolute rather than relative one, and so reports absurdly low poverty rates.
Doug