Is “New Poverty” Dead?

Kausfiles reports:

What if they created a bogus “poverty” measure … and it was too bogus to use with a straight face? In 2011, the Census Bureau unveiled its “Supplemental Poverty Measure,” designed to replace the old familiar LBJ-era poverty measure (based on the cost of an “economy” diet, multiplied by 3 and indexed for inflation) with a new index so complicated it was barely comprehensible even to many poverty wonks.** The “SPM” has some useful updates–it takes into account food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit, for example, meaning it doesn’t count as “poor” many people who are helped by those programs. But its key feature–some (e.g. me) would say the trick liberals were trying to pull on the public–was that it wasn’t a measure of absolute deprivation. It measured relative income, even though this aspect was assiduously hidden.