Official Poverty

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Official Poverty

The official poverty measure doesn’t count most government subsidies, such as Treasury checks beneficiaries receive from refundable tax credits, debit cards loaded with food-stamp allowances, and Medicaid payments as income to the recipients. 

Why would that be?

When all benefits are counted, the percentage of Americans living in poverty falls to only 2.5%. Bruce Meyer of the University of Chicago and James Sullivan of the University of Notre Dame arrived at a similar figure by comparing the actual goods and services consumed by poor households in 1980 with the actual level of consumption of households that were being counted as poor in 2017. They found that only 2.8% of households in 2017 were consuming at or below the actual poverty consumption level. 

These findings also agree with the Census American Housing Survey, which has found that 42% of poor households own homes with an average of three bedrooms, 1½ bathrooms, a garage and a porch or patio. The average poor American family lives in a home larger than the average home of middle-income families in France, Germany and the U.K., and 80% of poor American households have air conditioning.

For those who are healthy, "Poor" in this country no longer means "impoverished;" its meaning is closer to "less than someone else."