South By North Strategies, Ltd.

Writing in Spotlight, Shawn Fremstad of the Center for Economic and Policy Research proposes three improvements to the proposed supplemental poverty measure. Writes Fremstad:

Overhauling the poverty measure is sometimes presented as a technical issue, and the approach recommended by the NAS as a fait accompli that simply needs to be implemented without making any policy decisions.  This isn’t the case. While there are a myriad of technical issues involved in operationalizing the NAS approach, there are also major policy questions . These include, most importantly, where to actually set the supplemental poverty threshold, a question that the NAS called “ultimately political.”
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Three modifications to the SPM are essential: 1) the thresholds must be set at a minimally decent level, one that doesn’t continue to “define poverty down” as the current measure has; 2) education and basic savings should be treated as necessities rather than luxuries; and 3) the thresholds should be adjusted upward for families without health insurance. These modifications would improve the measure’s accuracy and are consistent with the overall approach NAS recommended.