Daily News

RALEIGH - The Census Bureau reported Tuesday that more than 1.25 million North Carolinians lived in poverty in 2007. For a family of four, living under the poverty level means living on less than $1,767 per month, or $58 a day.

This is a sobering statistic and one that conceals as much as it reveals. It requires us to think of poverty in terms of income alone, as if poverty were simply a matter of what families can and cannot afford.

Such a view is dangerously one-dimensional. Poverty is as much about where people come from, what they own and the education level and work opportunities of their family members as how much they make. It is a problem in multiple dimensions.

This view of poverty is not reflected in the statistics released Tuesday. Indeed, our official poverty measure is an arbitrary calculation.

In the 1960s, a Social Security Administration worker took the cheapest possible family food plan and, calculating that families at the time spent about one-third of their income on food, simply multiplied the cost of the "thrifty" food plan by three. Thus was born the federal poverty level.

Adjustments have been made to account for changes in the price of food, but the formula remains unaltered, despite the fact that three-times-the-price-of-food is no longer a realistic way to determine what a family needs to survive. (more…)

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