I've written several times about the Bush administration's cavalier 1984 attitude toward words. Now they seem to be doing it with numbers. This paper by Jared Bernstein and Arloc Sherman dissects the latest report by the Census Bureau on the poverty level. Basically, the Bureau is using different ways to measure poverty; these new ways result - surprise! - in a lower poverty rate than the 12.7% reported earlier this year. In fact, the rate drops by better than a third to 8.3% with the new measures.
Fundamentally, the Bureau does not use comparable numbers in measuring income and poverty threshholds. For example, they treat your home equity as income but do not raise the poverty line to reflect the full cost of housing for home owners and renters. Nor do the new measures include the cost of child care in calculating one's expenses, thus the income your wife earns is not offset by the money you pay for child care while she is working. Also, your out-of-pocket medical expenses don't figure in the new calculation although they were counted in previous calculations.
What happened to the idea of calling a spade a spade?
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