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The poverty line, which is now built into all kinds of government helping programs, was drawn up by a woman, Mollie Orshansky, who had first-hand experience with hunger. The line is essentially three times a minimum food budget, a level below which “everyday living implied choosing between an adequate diet of the most economical sort and some other necessity.” Though adjusted for inflation, it’s meant to measure absolute poverty (eating vs. not eating), not relative poverty (eating hamburger vs. foie gras). A War on Poverty wouldn’t make much sense otherwise.
Well, that’s what the official definition would lead you to believe. About one American in eight (12.7 percent) lived below the official poverty line in 2004, compared to one in nine (11.1 percent) in 1973. So all those people must be just as bad off in real terms as they were three decades before, right?
- In the early 1970s, 60 percent of poverty-level adults had untreated cavities; by the late 1990s, the rate was 40 percent.
