[US] Poverty line needs overhaul, experts say

from The San Luis Obispo Tribune

By Clay Barbour

ST. LOUIS - Twice a month Tonetta Jenkins of Swansea, Ill., retreats to her bedroom, turns on some music and spreads her bills out across the bed.

There, from a good vantage point, Jenkins, 43, practices what some call creative arithmetic, what others call trying to get blood from a stone.

Jenkins works a 40-hour week as a psychiatric aide and yet frequently finds herself having to choose between which bills to pay in full, which ones to pay partially and which ones to let slide until the next paycheck.

"I'm living week-to-week, paycheck-to-paycheck," she says. "It takes all I got to make ends meet, and sometimes I just don't see a way out."

Jenkins wouldn't mind a little help once in a while, but the simple truth is she just isn't poor enough.

She and her husband, William, live on her salary of $16,000 a year. The poverty line for a family of two is $13,200.

Since the 1960s, the federal poverty line has stood as the official division between the haves and the have-nots. And qualification for nearly all federal, state and local social programs has been based - at least in part - on where someone lives in relation to it.

The problem, experts say, is that the poverty line bears little resemblance to the modern world. It is a holdover from a time when food represented a third of all household costs and child care wasn't an issue.

And despite the existence of other, arguably more accurate poverty assessments, there seems to be little impetus for a widescale recalibration. Such a move would create a bleaker view of the nation's economy by increasing the number of people considered poor and would likely add financial stress to many already-strapped social programs.

"Can you imagine the political fallout if they made the poverty line reflect reality?" said Amy Blouin, executive director of the Missouri Budget Project, a nonprofit state budget analysis group. "What politician wants to be in office when poverty officially jumps from 12 percent to 18 or 20 percent?"

Originally dubbed the "thrifty food plan," the poverty line was first established in 1963.

It was then that a government statistician set the threshold at three times the annual cost of feeding a family of three, about $3,100. It was considered, at the time, a conservative underestimate of poverty.

One year later, President Lyndon Johnson declared his famous "War on Poverty" and used the poverty line as the official yardstick.

Today the poverty threshold ranges from $9,800 for an individual to $23,400 for a family of five.

"When you think about how much it costs to live these days, with health care and child care and rent and transportation, it's pretty clear that you can make well above that threshold and still struggle just to get by," said Mark Rank, a Washington University professor and author of "One Nation, Underprivileged: Why American Poverty Affects Us All."

Rank said that if a family of four tried to live on $20,000 (the highest amount such a family could earn without crossing the poverty line) they could afford about $18 a day for food.

"Obviously that's not going to go very far," he said.

No one knows this better than Tom and Stacy Mergenthal. The couple have been married for 10 years and for nearly all of that time, they've hovered around the poverty line.

They have two children, Madison, 8, and Bryson, 6. Another child is due any day now.

Until he quit a few weeks ago, Tom Mergenthal worked as kitchen manager for a restaurant in St. Charles, Mo. He made about $19,000 a year.

"Some weeks you just have to decide between paying utilities or eating," he said. "You learn to do without a lot."

Tom was one of the thousands of Missourians recently knocked off the Medicaid rolls. Last year Missouri overhauled the state's Medicaid program, eliminating coverage for about 90,000 people. The move lowered the income limits for qualifying, setting some caps as low as 17 percent of the federal poverty level or about $2,800 for a family of three.

Although Mergenthal's salary placed his family below the poverty line, he still earned too much to qualify for state health care. Mergenthal suffers from diabetes and asthma. He takes 11 different medications, which run about $1,000 a month. His kids still qualify for insurance. And Stacy, who has worked in the past, does qualify until a few months after she gives birth.

"There is just no way I can cover that bill without help," he said. "I'll get another job, but I won't make that much money."

Social scientists have for years argued to increase the thresholds for the poverty line. Several competing poverty lines have been introduced, most of them taking a more nuanced approach. One example is the self-sufficiency standard of Missouri.

Unlike the federal poverty line, the self-sufficiency standard looks at several characteristics, including the cost of living in an area, family size, the age of children and health care needs. The difference between the two is often substantial.

For example, the federal poverty threshold for a single mother of two this year is $16,600, regardless of where they live. The self-sufficiency standard for that same family, living in the St. Louis region, for example, ranges from about $27,000 in the city of St. Louis to slightly more than $35,000 in St. Louis County.

Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation says the poverty line is already too generous. Rector said many of those who live below the poverty line fail to meet "any common sense definition of the word."

According to the Heritage Foundation:

Forty-six percent of all poor households actually own their own homes.

Seventy-six percent of poor households have air conditioning, compared to 36 percent of the entire U.S. population 30 years ago.

Only 6 percent of poor households are overcrowded.

"They may not be living an opulent lifestyle, but they are not the image you think of when the word `poverty' is used," Rector said.

Kristen Alliegro lives in a small house in St. Louis with her two sons, Bowen, 6, and Connor, 3. It's true that Alliegro, a single mom, has a CD player and a TV and most common appliances. But her home is packed with donated and found items.

"I buy almost nothing," she said.

In 2003 Kristen Alliegro worked for a bank, making $29,000 a year. Then she lost her job. After months of searching, Alliegro decided to go back to school.

"It wasn't an easy decision," she said. "I knew that it meant we would have to go through some really tight years."

Alliegro enrolled at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, and began the long process of earning a degree in social work. She is scheduled to graduate in December.

During the past three years Alliegro and her sons have lived off of a combination of student loans, social welfare programs such as food stamps and Medicaid, and the roughly $10,000 a year she makes from part-time work.

Still, she struggles. Her bathroom is in bad shape, needing about $1,500 in plumbing repairs. And on the living room coffee table sits a mountain of past-due bills, several of them hundreds of dollars in arrears.

"I have been so close to losing the house so may times," she said. "It has been a real balancing act."

Tonetta Jenkins can relate. Until last year, she and her husband, William Merriweather, were doing pretty well.

She earned about $16,000 a year working at St. Louis Psychological Rehabilitation Center, and Merriweather earned about $50,000 a year working for Elementis Pigments, an East St. Louis paint company.

In August 2005, Merriweather was one of about 100 employees let go. Since then the couple have lived on Jenkins' salary and the $600 a month Merriweather gets in unemployment insurance.

"After you pay your car note, your house note and all your utilities, you're broke again until the next payday," Jenkins said. "Sometimes you just want to cry. But that won't help."

According to Rank, such experiences are not unusual. Studies show that 60 percent of Americans between the ages of 20 and 75 will live at least one year below the poverty line. Seventy-five percent will experience at least one year of life at 150 percent of the poverty line. And two-thirds of Americans will at some point need a social safety net program.

"Today in America, where our jobs are less stable than they have ever been before, the distance between living well and struggling is just not that far," Rank said. "So it's important that we be as honest and accurate as we can about who is living in poverty. Because it could happen to anyone."