[lbo-talk] question about poverty statistics

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Sun Sep 4 14:04:34 PDT 2005


stannard67 at aol.com wrote:


>Of the cited increase in poverty, a conservative colleague of mine
>retorted: "The percentage of Americans 'living in poverty' is
>guaranteed to increase in any year where the growth in the immigrant
>population exceeds the growth in the native population. Which is
>every year. Its a statistical illusion which, if you controlled for
>status of immigration, vanishes."

But poverty declined for most of the 1990s, a time when immigration was strong. As the EPI briefing paper<http://www.epi.org/briefingpapers/130/bp130.pdf> pointed out, immigrants poverty rates declined more than natives. The rise in recent years has been the result of a crappy job market and crappy earnings - and though we'll never know for sure, immigration has probably slowed a lot since 9/11.

Your conservative friend overlooks something about the definition of poverty - the poverty line was set in the 1960s and has been adjusted only for inflation ever since.The poverty line for a family of 3 was about 40% of the family median in 1960 - it was 31% of the median in 1980, and around 26% last year. That's a very low bar. If you used the definition used by a lot of academic researchers, an income less than 50% of the median (which comes close to what people say in polls a poverty income is), the poverty rate would be 150-175% what it is now.

Doug



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