The New Supplemental Poverty Measure

Howdy Poverty News Blog readers!  Joseph here - sorry for the lag in updates.  Kale is out of the game for awhile with the family, and in juggling workloads, I've let the updates here slide a little bit.  So I'm working on fixing that, and also am being thankful for Ed Dolan, who kindly commented on the post regarding the new Census information.

Ed Dolan has a blog over at the EconoMonitor, and with a two part post he talked about the Census Bureau's new Supplementary Poverty Measure:

Understanding the New View of Poverty (1): The Erosion of Stereotypes

"Overall, the SPM does not give us all that many more poor people—16 percent of the population in 2010, compared with 15.2 for the old measure. The surprises come in how that poverty is distributed among the population..."

Understanding the New View of Poverty (2): What Helps and What Hurts

"The most important contribution of the SPM is to show that key federal antipoverty programs that official data omit play a big role in the lives of people living at or near the poverty level..."

Big thanks to Ed Dolan for the heads up and the well written articles.