WaPo: Trump's latest scam: Defining poverty out of existence

[Celerity]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/05/08/trumps-latest-scam-defining-poverty-out-existence/?utm_term=.87317b0b5524

The Trump administration wants to lower the poverty rate in the United States. But there’s a catch: If the plan under discussion is enacted, it would cut the number of people living in poverty not by giving them a wage increase, but by defining them out of it. “Instead of actually doing anything to cut poverty in America, Trump is trying to fudge the numbers to artificially ‘reduce’ the U.S. poverty rate,” said Rebecca Vallas, vice president of the Poverty to Prosperity Program at the Center for American Progress. “It’s mathematical gaslighting.”

Well, that’s one way to make it look like “we have the strongest economy in the history of our nation,” as Trump likes to proclaim.

On Monday, the Office of Management and Budget put out a request for comments on the possibility of adjusting how the government determines the official poverty measure, better known as the poverty threshold. That’s the calculation used to determine eligibility for a range of government social safety net programs, including Medicaid, food stamps and housing assistance.

One proposed change would alter how the poverty threshold rises to reflect inflation; under the plan the threshold would move from using the consumer price index to using the “chained” consumer price index. While almost all indexes, including the CPI, measure inflation, in part, by assuming consumers will substitute one item for another when things get too costly, chained CPI does it more aggressively. Over time this change would lead to a decrease in the number of people living in poverty, not because they are earning more money, but because they will not meet the increasingly narrow definition of it. As a result, “fewer and fewer people would receive benefits over time,” said Monique Morrissey, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute.

What makes this idea particularly absurd is that studies repeatedly find that lower-income households experience greater inflation than higher-earning ones. (Researcher Xavier Jaravel dubbed this “inflation inequality” in a 2017 paper.) One reason: Companies are catering to the top tier of earners, upping competition and reducing prices for many of the products the affluent are likely to use. For example, decreases in the price of organic groceries acted to reduce the overall increase in the price of food as calculated by the government. But fewer low-income households purchase organic food, since it costs more.

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[struggle4progress]

1. "Just pay no attention to the starved corpses lying in the street"