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| | ==Problems with America's official definition== | | ==Problems with America's official definition== |
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| | + | The Hoover Institution says: |
| | *America’s most relied-upon metric for charting a course in our national effort to reduce and eliminate poverty appears to offer unreliable, and indeed increasingly misleading, soundings on where we are ... | | *America’s most relied-upon metric for charting a course in our national effort to reduce and eliminate poverty appears to offer unreliable, and indeed increasingly misleading, soundings on where we are ... |
| | *In fact, over the past three decades, the relationship between the [Official Poverty Rate and ... other indicators has been perversely discordant. [http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/3930481.html] | | *In fact, over the past three decades, the relationship between the [Official Poverty Rate and ... other indicators has been perversely discordant. [http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/3930481.html] |
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| | *The official poverty rate is incapable of representing what it was devised to portray: namely, a constant level of absolute need in American society. The biases and flaws in the poverty rate are so severe that it has depicted a great period of general improvements in living standards — three decades from 1973 onward — as a time of increasing prevalence of absolute poverty. [ibid] | | *The official poverty rate is incapable of representing what it was devised to portray: namely, a constant level of absolute need in American society. The biases and flaws in the poverty rate are so severe that it has depicted a great period of general improvements in living standards — three decades from 1973 onward — as a time of increasing prevalence of absolute poverty. [ibid] |
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| | + | Gordon M. Fisher, Department of Health and Human Services, wrote: |
| | + | *As technology progresses and the general standard of living rises, new consumption items are introduced. They may at first be purchased and used only by upper-income families; however, they gradually diffuse to middle- and lower-income levels. Things originally viewed as luxuries--for instance, indoor plumbing, telephones, and automobiles--come to be seen as conveniences and then as necessities. [http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/papers/relabs.htm] |
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| | '''Sources:''' <references/> | | '''Sources:''' <references/> |
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| | [[category:political terms]] | | [[category:political terms]] |