As a part of the Annie E. Casey’s 2009 Kids Count Report, the Foun­da­tion included a spe­cial report that talked about the lack of good poverty data. The report pointed to an out­dated mea­sure­ment of poverty that our gov­ern­ment still uses that hasn’t been updated since the 1960’s. The Foun­da­tion says that the lack of good data hurts the cause of help­ing vul­ner­a­ble chil­dren in the states.

From this Asso­ci­ated Press arti­cle that we found at Google News, reporter David Crary talked to the Casey Foun­da­tion Senior Vice Pres­i­dent, Patrick McCarthy.

In its spe­cial report on national data, the Casey Foun­da­tion said “per­haps the sin­gle most glar­ing short­fall comes in our efforts to mea­sure poverty, the key per­for­mance indi­ca­tor that rises above all oth­ers in its impact on children’s futures.“

The poverty for­mula still used by the fed­eral gov­ern­ment, which Casey called “thor­oughly out­dated,” was devel­oped in the 1960s. It cal­cu­lates the cost of a basic gro­cery bud­get for a given fam­ily size and mul­ti­plies the total by three because food, in the ‘60s, rep­re­sented one-third of a typ­i­cal fam­ily budget.

The for­mula has not been recal­cu­lated since then even though, accord­ing to Casey, food now accounts for only about one-seventh of a typ­i­cal family’s budget.

The for­mula takes no account of child care, trans­porta­tion, health insur­ance, and cer­tain gov­ern­ment ben­e­fits such as food stamps and hous­ing vouch­ers. Also — except for Alaska and Hawaii — it does not reflect regional dif­fer­ences in the cost of living.

McCarthy said the National Acad­emy of Sci­ences has devel­oped some rec­om­men­da­tions for a new for­mula that would take many of these addi­tional fac­tors into con­sid­er­a­tion, and a bill reflect­ing the pro­pos­als has been intro­duced in Congress.

Skep­tics in var­i­ous camps worry that any changes might cause harm by either increas­ing or decreas­ing the num­ber of fam­i­lies offi­cially defined as poor, said McCarthy. “But the real­ity is, we need an accu­rate count.”

The poverty mea­sure — used to deter­mine eli­gi­bil­ity for var­i­ous ben­e­fits — has been a source of con­cern to many advo­cacy groups over the years.

Kin­sey Dinan, a senior pol­icy asso­ciate with the National Cen­ter for Chil­dren in Poverty at Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity, said the cur­rent sys­tem poten­tially dis­ad­van­tages fam­i­lies that don’t receive sub­stan­tial gov­ern­ment assis­tance and those liv­ing in areas with high liv­ing costs.

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