"What going wrong in this country?"

All over this country you hear the question, "what has happened? Why are things so bad right now."  You hear it at Tea Party meetings.  You hear it from Democrats, Republicans, Greens, and Socialists like Sen. Bernie Sanders...

 

One of the problems we have is simply bad numbers.  One thing you can count on is for Government and the Ivory Tower types to be behind the times.  In the real world working families, the middle class, and small businesses understand this--because they have to.  The big bureaucracy's, be it Government or Corporations often take time to respond to whats happening on the ground and often just don't get it. 

 

They have to use models, statistics, and theories when they sit at their desks and speculate about the world. 

 

Well when your models, statistics, and theories are flawed or poorly applied you get a disconnect with the real world. 

 

As a newly published study from the Center for Economic and Policy Research notes, our way of measuring poverty is screwed up.  So that working families that appear to be "doing just fine" in the eyes of talking heads are actually struggling to make ends meet.

 

They have a great graph--as sometimes talking heads need pictures--to make it easy for them...

 

Go read the study... A Modern Framework for Measuring Poverty and Basic Economic Security

This report details how the dominant framework for understanding and measuring poverty in the United States has become a conservative one. The current U.S. approach to measuring poverty views poverty only in terms of having an extremely low level of annual income, and utilizes poverty thresholds that are adjusted only for inflation rather than for changes in overall living standards. As a result, the official poverty measure has effectively defined deprivation down over the last four decades, moving it further and further away from mainstream living standards over time, as well as from majority public opinion of the minimum amount needed to “get along” at a basic level. A new Supplemental Income Poverty Measure (SIPM) proposed by the Obama administration makes some important improvements to the current poverty measure. However, the SIPM remains a conservative approach that appears likely to lock in the poverty line at an extremely low level.

This report proposes a new framework for measuring poverty and basic economic security in the United States. Instead of being limited to the “extremely-low-income-only” approach the current poverty line and administration’s proposed Supplemental Income Poverty Measure (SIPM) represent, this framework should utilize measures of low income and other forms of economic hardship related to low income. 

Posted via email from Jim Nichols