Poverty, More on Top of More

I recently saw a stat that 8 million Americans have "fallen" into poverty in recent months, and that it was the the biggest increase in 60 years. 

When I read that, I thought to myself, What was going on in 1960 that would have been worse than now? 

I couldn't think of anything, and in fact have always thought that 1960 was an era of relative prosperity. But I soon forgot to look into it in the midst of the rest of our hell-in-a-handbasket moment in time.

Then today another friend shared a Washington Post story that gave that same 8 million number. This time my friend was more helpful in her summary. She put it this way:

That is the biggest single-year increase since the government began tracking poverty 60 years ago.

Ohhh, so that's why 1960 was the year: it wasn't that there was such a dramatic increase in poverty that year, it's that it was the year when the federal government came up with a definition of poverty in the first place and began tracking it. 

Which then led directly to the War on Poverty during the Johnson administration. (And then, one could argue, to the backlash against it.)

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The federal poverty line, by the way, is set at three times the cost of a defined subsistence food basket. That multiplier was set in 1955 and has not been changed, even though the percent of household costs has changed greatly since then (for instance, housing and child care as a percent of household costs have both increased, while food has become cheaper). As the linked Brookings Institute testimony from 2008 put it, the multiplier by that time should have been 7.8. The resulting undercount of people in poverty is one of those widely known "secrets" in this, the wealthiest country in the world.