The Census Bureau is playing with numbers to hide growing poverty rates, suggests a new report published jointly by the non-partisan Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP).
The new measures will discard expert analysis developed by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), which created a rigorous statistical method in 1995 for measuring poverty as accurately as possible.
The Census Bureau has never followed these recommendations precisely to produce its official poverty rate, but has adopted some of the measures. The official poverty rate for 2004, the last year for which complete data has been compiled, using the current method was set at 12.7 percent.
The new method, according to the report, will no longer count child care costs or out-of pocket medical expenses as part of working families’ expenses. Additionally, the new Census Bureau method will grossly exaggerate potential home equity as part of family income, even when families do not own homes.
"We have welcomed past efforts by the Bureau to offer alternative poverty measures," said Jared Bernstein, EPI senior economist. "Their most recent release, however, ignores critical innovations and omits essential costs like child care for working parents and thus represents a step backwards."
In other words, the Census Bureau is counting fewer expenses and exaggerating income levels while using old poverty thresholds. Imagine it. The Census Bureau is going to pretend that working families have fewer expenses – suddenly child care and health care are free? – and that families magically got a huge raise.
This new procedure, according to the report will allow the Census Bureau to amend the 2004 official poverty rate to read 8.8 percent, a nearly one-third cut, without a single change in public policy to step up the fight against poverty.
When strictly followed, the most accurate NAS standards show actual poverty to be a couple of percentage points higher than the official rate, indicating that even the outgoing method for calculating the official rate is conservative.
In the past, the Census Bureau has used some of these more exacting NAS standards to create an unofficial poverty rate that it didn’t publicize, but it now has announced plans to drop this method of accounting altogether.
The Census Bureau plans to retain accounting using its traditional method, but it has stated that it will not publicize the results, rather it will bury them on its website.
Arloc Sherman of the CBPP remarked, "The mystery is why they’ve stopped publicizing an even more complete set of poverty measures, guided by the National Academy of Sciences, that generally show that poverty rates are higher, not lower, than the official yardstick shows."
The Census Bureau Public Information Office refused to respond to an e-mail inquiry asking for an explanation for why it has chosen to use less accurate methods and inflated estimates to artificially reduce poverty rate.
No doubt the explanation lies with White House pressure on the Bureau to provide more glowing figures in the face of international criticism of US domestic problems including high poverty and massive income inequality in the richest country in the world.
This maneuver is another example of Republican failure. The right wing wants to play with numbers rather than bring real solutions to the table that will help working families. They have had 12 years in power in Congress to pass all kinds of legislation to protect working families from hardship.
What have we gotten instead?
Pervasive corruption in their party
Free trade agreements that weaken workers’ rights
Education privatization and massive cuts
Costly and inefficient prescription drug cuts that hurt seniors
Massive cuts to Medicaid
Cuts to student loan programs
Outsourcing and worker displacement
More layoffs
Cuts to and even elimination of portions of our social safety net
Hamstrung federal agencies that couldn’t respond quickly enough to protect working families trapped by Hurricane Katrina
Weakened federal safety and health agencies that oversaw preventable mining disasters
Weakened regulatory agencies that looked the other way while big companies like Enron robbed their employees
This recklessness has to end. Let’s work together in the coming months to turn out the biggest possible majority against them and end their reign of economic terror.
Also, contact the Census Bureau to let them know that you know what they are up to and ask them why they won’t tell the truth about poverty at
pio@census.gov
