Why TV Doesn't Rot My Brain and Why We Need a New Standard for Measuring Poverty

Yesterday, I was reading an article over at the Center for American Progress called "It's Time for a Better Poverty Measure."

My college professors

My thoughts immediately turned to TV. No, not for an escape from the 9-page article. For verification.

I was a political science major in college. Yet, most of my knowledge of how the American government actually works comes from one of my top three TV shows, The West Wing.

I love the West Wing. I actually feel more patriotic when I hear the show's theme song than when I hear the national anthem. The West Wing is proof that TV is informative and substantive, thus worth the hours of time I spend watching.

This article, the one on the poverty measure, was immediately familiar to me.

Dude, Aaron Sorkin covered this years ago.

It's from a Season 3 episode called "Indians in the Lobby" (which you most definitely cannot watch here and this scene most definitely does not begin around 5:54) where two White House staffers discuss a political problem:

SAM: On Monday, the OMB is putting out a new formula for calculating the
poverty level.
TOBY: What's the problem?
SAM: It's a good news, bad news thing. Under the new formula, poverty is up two percent. It was anyone under $17,524, now it's $20,000.
TOBY: What does that shake out to?
SAM: Four million new poor people.
TOBY: Four million?!?
SAM: Yeah. Obviously, that's the bad news.
TOBY: Yeah...
SAM: The good news is more people will be eligible for benefits.
TOBY: And taxpayers are nuts about that. Let's get back to the bad news. Four million people became poor on the President's watch?
SAM: They didn't become poor. They were poor already. And now we're calling them poor.
TOBY: What was wrong with the old formula?
SAM: I don't know.
TOBY: Find out.
SAM: It is possible that this is a statistical reality and not a political finding.
TOBY: Well, get together with somebody at OMB and find out what was wrong with the statistical reality of the old formula.

The reality for us not living in TV-land is that our formula ain't so good. As the article says, the official measure is "deeply flawed," and "low and in many ways arbitrary."

So where did that old formula come from? And for that, we'll turn back to the West Wing. Here Sam talks to Bernice from the office of management and budget, about where the old formula came from. (This scene does definitely not begin at 15:15 on the same link).

SAM: Well how was the old one reached? The current one.
BERNICE: In 1963, an eastern European immigrant named Mollie Orshansky, who was working over in social security, came up with it. Food was the most costly living expense where she came from.
SAM: Our cost of living formula for the last 40 years has been based on life in Poland during
the Cold War?
BERNICE: This is what I'm talking about. I mean, food doesn't account for one-third of a family's budget. Housing is more expensive than food. The current model also doesn't take into account transportation and health insurance. So let's call the current model the old
model and sign off on the new model.

And this, my friends, is true. This is where our poverty measure comes from. Aaron Sorkin wasn't making that one up.

One of the funniest lines in this article on the poverty measure is this: "Living costs and standards have changed in many ways since the 1960s."

Oh, really? You mean things are different than they were 50 years ago? No kidding.

Orshansky took the idea that a family spent a third of its income on food. So she calculated a low-cost food budget and multiplied it by three.

Which is fine, except that food now represents closer to 10-15% of a family's budget. A new formula would take into account costs for food, clothing, shelter and a little more.

Plus, the same formula counts no matter where you live. And for those of us making it here in the Windy City, we know living costs aren't the same everywhere.

A year ago, my husband and I lived in Michigan. We rented a two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment with a dishwasher, washer and dryer for about $500 a month. Now we pay $850 for a one-bedroom about half the size with a tiny bathroom, no dishwasher and coin-laundry in the basement.

Them's the breaks when you want to live in the big city. Here's a cost of living analysis comparing the two:

Oh how I miss the cheap groceries...

For a two-parent, two-child family, the poverty level in 2007 was $21,027. No matter where you lived. So even though your dollar goes half as far in Chicago than in rural Michigan, we're not adjusting what it means to be poor.

So what's the problem? Well, it's essentially a political one. We don't want the number of poor people in the U.S. to rise substantially from one moment to the next. We've already got a global recession. How much more gloom and doom do we need?

For example, the official poverty rate in 2007 was 12.5 percent.

If we changed the poverty measure to more accurately reflect who's poor, the new standard for that same family of four would be between $23,465 and $27,744, bringing the poverty rate to between 15 and 16 percent. With 300 million people in the United States, that's 10.5 million new poor people.

10.5 million!  Dang it!

That's a lot more poor people. And since welfare programs often use the poverty measure to calculate benefits, that means a lot more people eligible for entitlement programs, which as Toby said and as we saw last week, is incredibly popular.

So why should we do it?

It basically comes down to this: it's the right thing to do.

For one, we're using bad math. That's not good.

And two, there are a lot more people barely scraping by than we thought. We could at least recognize that. Maybe they would be eligible for help. Or maybe they would just feel better if we acknowledged that their situation is pretty crappy.

Of course, in the beautiful world of the West Wing, they approve the new formula. Here Toby lets the news break to the administration's campaign manager, Bruno, (who already has to launch a presidential campaign with a president who lied about his serious illness, but that's another story) ....

TOBY: Listen, the OMB's gonna come out with a recommendation for a new way to
calculate the poverty level.
BRUNO: Show of hands?
TOBY: No. But the formula raises the poverty level 2,000 and change.
BRUNO: So what is it now?
TOBY: 20,000 a year. The problem is we're without a campaign and with 4 million new poor people.
BRUNO: That's the problem?
TOBY: Yeah.
BRUNO: Not that someone making 21,000 a year is considered comfortable?
TOBY: We're working on that one, too.

So TV-land solved the problem. But we haven't yet.

There's two ways it could be done. One, the Obama administration could just make a new measure. Two, Congress could do it. There's even a Measuring American Poverty Act that was just introduced in the Senate.

Changing the poverty measure is sort of a bummer. There's no way around it. It's not fun. It doesn't get us anything. It makes our stats a little more grim.

But if we want to end poverty, or at least fight it, it seems like we should have a more accurate system for figuring out who's poor, one that's not based on the world of Mad Men.

Speaking of Mad Men, time to get back to watching TV...