It certainly meant something different when LBJ embarked on his Great Society program intended to lift many out of poverty. When LBJ talked about poverty he talked about people living in houses with dirt floors and without electricity and heat.
This is not the case anymore, yet we still consider millions to be poor. So the operative question becomes what framework should be used to measure poverty.
Essentially, is poverty a more relative concept which fluidly flucuates with the rich in society; or is poverty more a absolute concept which only flucuates after major societal shifts in wealth coupled with the increasing regularity of consumption of cultural shifting goods or services by greater numbers of people (such as electricity, cars, or the internet)?
Before you answer as to whether poverty is more a relative or absolute concept, take into consideration some facts about those the government considers poor. From the Heritage Foundation:
43% of all poor households actually own their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio.
80% of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, in 1970, only 36% of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.
The average poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.
Nearly three-quarters of poor households own a car; 31% own two or more cars.
97% of poor households have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions.
78% have a VCR or DVD player; 62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception.
89% own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and more than a third have an automatic dishwasher.
If you think poverty should be measured as a relative concept, then these facts shouldn’t bother you. What determines poverty is whether the rich get richer and not whether the poor get poorer.
This leads me to another rule about Democrats: Their welfare policy is more driven by class division and demonization of the rich (in order to get votes) then it is over concern for the poor or an effort to truly help them.
Within a “relativist” framework of measuring poverty an assumption is that the economic pie is only so big; and as the rich get richer, more of the pie must be taken from them and given to the poor. The situation of the rich drives the framework, not concern for the poor.
But this is not true. The economic pie is not a zero-sum game where the rich win at the expense of the poor. What economists have seen is that while the rich may get wealthier at a faster pace then the poor, this does not mean that the poor don’t get wealthier. The economic wave raises all…
This indicates that an “absolutist” approach to measuring poverty is appropriate because the poor only become truly poor after years of not accruing wealth as quickly as the rich which makes it difficult for them to afford goods like electricity like in the day of LBJ.
Take a peak at the Heritage Foundation video below, which sheds some light on the “fast facts” listed above and on the issue of how to measure poverty.
Video: Why the way poverty is measured may not comport with how we define poverty
