Talk:Poverty line in the United States
- Americano-centric article: there are other definitions
- Isn't this more commonly known as the poverty line?
Please forgive my earlier POV editorializing, but I'm trying to figure out one thing -- and I'm not sure it's something I can merely assert as "true" or not.
It seems that the definition of "poverty level" depends solely on income: wages, profits, money you got from family and friends, etc.
If your income from these non-govermental sources is belown the "poverty level" or "poverty threshold", than you are entitled to various welfare benefits.
My question is, after receiving welfare benefits, are you still poor? I mean, has anybody done any studies on the cash value of welfare? Like, if I get $700/month for rent assistance and food stamps, that is worth $8,400 a year. Add that to part-time my McDonald's job ($5,000 a year), and now my total income would seem to be $13,400, which is above the poverty level.
May I still fairly said to be "living in poverty", when the total of my wages and welfare benefits is above the poverty line?
- Ed, ignoring for a moment the rest of your text, your understanding of what the poverty line reflects is incorrect. Quoting from Gordon Fisher's paper on the history of the poverty line,
- Orshansky presented the poverty thresholds as a measure of income inadequacy, not of income adequacy - "if it is not possible to state unequivocally 'how much is enough,' it should be possible to assert with confidence how much, on an average, is too little."
That is to say, the poverty line does not say: "If you have this much income, you should be okay." It says, "if you have less than this much income, we can say for pretty darn sure you don't have enough to get by."
- I'm still wondering about the phrases "living in poverty" and "live below the poverty line". If a family has 3 times as much cash income as it needs to feed itself, and STILL gets government assistance, then WHO SAYS they are "in poverty"? I daresay tens of millions of people would risk their lives to come to America and live in "poverty" like that! --Uncle Ed 13:46, 21 Aug 2003 (UTC)
- Your correction is wrong, though. Only noncash benefits aren't counted toward the poverty line; cash benefits are counted in the statistics. Also, yes, the poverty lines are defined differently in different countries, so I would imagine there are people from other countries who would risk their lives to come here for that. DanKeshet 15:08, Aug 21, 2003 (UTC)
Just how many dollars per person per year is the poverty line in the US? -- Miguel