Is Poverty No Longer a Thing?
Posted by Peter Greene: 03 Sep 2016 Mike Petrilli was over at Campbell Brown’s place this week
where A) he was oddly billed as a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and a book author, but not as the head honcho of the Fordham Institute and B) suggesting that we might need to reconsider our stances on poverty, now that it’s not so much of a thing. I’m not an economist and I don’t play one on tv (though economists pretend to be education experts all the time, so maybe I should just throw caution to the wind), so I’m leery of wrestling with Petrilli’s contention that the poverty rate has dropped to 7.8%. But I can say this with confidence– there’s a huge amount of disagreement about what the poverty rate actually is. The census folks said that in 2014, the poverty rate was 14.8%. But medianincome rate stayed flat. The poverty rate dropped from 19% in 1967 to around 15% today. Maybe those numbers are all really low because the poverty cut score is set too low, and the true number is much higher. Or maybe the true poverty rate is actually 4.5%. One sometimes suspects that economists do not know what the hell they are talking about.
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To find out what the hell they might be talking about, read the full blog post here: CURMUDGUCATION: Is Poverty No Longer a Thing?