Poverty line numbers don’t add up in 2008
If a family of four in Buffalo has an income of less than $21,027 a year, that’s considered living below the poverty line.
Anything above that is considered getting by — even if barely.
But city officials — and experts at a national center on children and poverty — say such a number is much too low.
“It’s old. It’s antiquated,” said Deputy Mayor Donna M. Brown, the city’s anti-poverty leader. “I think poverty here might be a lot starker than we think.”
At the National Center for Children in Poverty at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, poverty experts have put together a “basic needs budget” that they say more accurately reflects what it costs to get by in Buffalo and in other U. S. cities in 2008.
For a family of four (two parents and two children) in Western New York, that “basic needs” number is $49,314 — more than double the current federal standard.
For a single-parent home with two kids, the center’s “basic needs” figure is $45,109.
The federal poverty line for that same family is just $16,705.
“The [federal] numbers are just too low,” said Dr. Nancy K. Cauthen, deputy director of the center, who testified before Congress in July 2007 about the issue.
Cauthen realizes a family living in Buffalo could get by on less than $49,000 — and that many do — but said that such a standard of living brings with it tough choices.
“A ‘basic needs budget’ says, this is what you need to get by in modern American society,” she said.
Here’s how the federal standard came to be:
In the 1960s, during the War on Poverty, federal officials divided a family’s income into various categories — food, for example, which made up approximately one-third of a household budget at that time — to formulate a federal poverty line.
According to research by the child poverty center, the 1960s federal poverty standard put poor families at about 50 percent of the nation’s median income.
Today, it equals a living standard at 29 percent of median income.
“If you are poor now, by the official standard, you are actually worse off related to the rest of Americans than if you were considered poor under the standard when it was created,” Cauthen said.
In 2008, a typical family budget looks much different than it did 40 years ago, she said.
For instance: Child care costs take up more room in a typical family budget, as do health care costs.
“When this measure was put together, in the ’60s, there were many families with stay-at-home moms,” said Cauthen.
The “basic needs budget” for Buffalo as tabulated by the center includes nine categories: rent and utilities, food, child care, health insurance, out-of-pocket medical, transportation, other day-to-day necessities, debt, payroll taxes and income taxes, including credits.
You can view the calculator online at the NCCP Web site: nccp.org/tools/frs/budget. php.
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