[sarchertech]

> The poverty line of $16k/person is set in part because it’s the line where going below likely means you can’t afford enough food no matter where in the U.S. you live.

That’s not correct at all. The poverty level is 3x the amount of money it took to feed one person a nutritional diet in 1963 and then adjusted for inflation. They picked 3 times because food represented about 1/3 of a poor family’s budget.

Note that they use CPI-U for the adjustment, and food prices haven’t risen as fast as most is the rest of the goods in CPI-U so it’s closer to 4x the amount needed to afford the minimum nutritional diet.

If you look here, you’ll see that the “thrifty food plan” for the most expensive person (male 20-50) comes out to $3,800 a year.

https://www.fns.usda.gov/research/cnpp/usda-food-plans/cost-...

If you just think about it for a minute $16k or $43 a day is a crazy amount for the minimum amount of money to afford food. I don’t spend that much on myself on average and I ‘m making many times more than $16k a year.

Now I can try very hard to come up with the most charitable explanation for what you are saying and assume that you mean that $16k is the number that you need to afford other necessities plus food.

However if that’s what you’re saying then the number 1 other necessity is housing. Which means for an accurate comparison you need to factor in housing price differences.

To your point housing cost is the largest difference between states, but it’s also the largest part of nearly everyone’s budget, even people living on $16k a year, and it’s far from the only difference. Groceries a fair amount between states, and other necessities are somewhere in between.

You can’t just look at a flat number across the US, there’s no way around it.

I mean just look at average rent. It’s more than 2x higher in NY than LA. Even looking at another southern state, GA. Rent is 25% higher there. That’s a huge difference and it absolutely needs to be accounted for if you care about comparing poverty between states.

[dahart]

1- The poverty thresholds are not using the 1963 guidelines and adjusting for inflation, that’s not correct either. https://www.census.gov/topics/income-poverty/poverty/guidanc...

2- $16k / year / person is not enough in the US to live comfortably, regardless of where you live. Going below that does in fact risk compromising nutrition, and the fact that that is what is actually occurring among the poor is pretty well documented.

3- If you want to use cost of living, then as you point out, NY is not a valid comparison to LA. Compare LA to Nebraska or South Dakota or any of a dozen other states where the cost of living is nearly the same, and you will see exactly what is said all over the internet: LA has a much higher population of poor than other comparable states.

4- The fact that LA’s ranked 32nd for tax revenue and #1 for poverty seems like something to be rightly ashamed of.

We’re tilting at windmills and failing to convince each other, but Louisiana is widely considered to be one of the poorest states in nation, and trying to argue otherwise on HN certainly won’t change the mountain of evidence or the summary at all.

[sarchertech]

The page you linked to doesn’t discuss how the “poverty threshold” is calculated. It discusses how the poverty threshold is used to measure poverty level.

It does however provide a link 3 paragraphs down that does tell you how the “poverty threshold” is calculated. A direct quote:

“The current official poverty measure was developed in the mid 1960s by Mollie Orshansky, a staff economist at the Social Security Administration. Poverty thresholds were derived from the cost of a minimum food diet multiplied by three to account for other family expenses.”

https://www.census.gov/topics/income-poverty/poverty/about/h...

Can you acknowledge that the risk of comprising nutrition on $16k a year is higher in a state where rent is 2x higher and groceries are 10% more expensive?

Literally every anti-poverty group in the country acknowledges that the failure to update the poverty threshold by region is a terrible failure in the way the United States handles poverty.

If you want to come up with a tortured method that only compares Louisiana to states with 85%+ white populations in order to fit your preconceived regionalist prejudices then have at it.

Let’s rank states by number of homeless people while we’re at it and see if that’s at all useful.

Maybe instead we could look at the percentage of people who can’t afford food, shelter, and basic necessities in their state on their income. As far as I can see the only major downside to doing that compared to other methods is that it doesn’t support the way you think the world ought to work.

[dahart]

You’re still wrong. What you quoted is what they did in 1963, not how they’re setting the poverty threshold today. The same page you pulled the quote from contains a paper that discusses the many changes to the poverty threshold calculation since 1963.

I offered up two states that have comparable cost of living. There are actually around 14 or 15 states that have lower cost of living than Louisiana, and all of them have a lower percentage of people below the federal poverty line than LA.

> Let’s rank states by number of homeless

Seems like another straw man to me. There are more people below the poverty line in Louisiana than there are homeless people in the entire US.

> Maybe instead we could look at the percentage of people who can’t afford food, shelter, and basic necessities in their state on their income.

That’s what ALICE is, we already talked about it, and the ALICE threshold is FAR higher than the federal poverty line in all 50 states.

OH, BTW, guess which state ranks highest on the ALICE poverty list…

> it doesn’t support the way you think the world ought to work.

You have a vivid imagination. I’ve been trying to avoid snark here, and appreciating that you also kept it low as well until now. I will mention that your interpretation of what I said about thresholds was not in any way ‘charitable’ let alone realistic. I would love to see your budget that stays under $43/day without compromising on food. Show it to me and I’ll list a few things you forgot you need that blow your budget. I don’t know how to live on $43/day assuming I don’t pay any rent.

[sarchertech]

I understand it’s confusing because the papers on the site mingle proposed plans with adopted plans.

Here’s a summary of exactly what happened. If you want to research that yourself I’ll include a link to an overview, but I know what I’m talking about.

1. Start with the 1963 base thresholds developed by Orshansky.

2. Apply the 1969 revision:

-Keep the 1963 nonfarm thresholds as the base.

-Change the inflation adjustment method from food-plan costs to CPI.

-Change the farm adjustment.

3. Every year thereafter:

-Take the prior threshold and adjust it by the relevant CPI. (Originally CPI-W, then CPI-U after about 1980.)

4. Apply a few technical revisions in 1981:

- Remove farm/nonfarm distinction.

- Remove male-headed/female-headed distinction.

- Expand family-size categories.

That’s it. The numbers are still based on the data from 1963 adjusted for inflation each year. There are differences in that we no longer look at the gender of the head of household and farm families no longer have lower multiple applied.

But the number is just the calculations from 1963 based on a multiple of the amount of food needed carried forward.

Most other countries use a relative benchmark for poverty and most other counties use COL adjustments by region. The US does not. It is stupid that we don’t. And using the resulting measurements from this flawed system is horribly misleading.

As to whether you can live on $43 a day minus rent. Louisiana has expanded Medicaid coverage, so someone making $16k a year will get free healthcare. Assuming a single person with no kids, they’ll also get about $180 a month in snap benefits which covers a little more than half of the $333 usda thrifty food plan. So how about you tell me how this hypothetical person can’t survive on $1,333 a month with rent, healthcare, and half of their food covered? If you can’t imagine being able to survive on that you must living in a very high cost of living area.

https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/working-pa...

[dahart]

> using the resulting measurements from this flawed system is horribly misleading

Then don’t. Use the cost-of-living metric you’ve been arguing for to answer the relevant question here. When accounting for cost of living, you will discover exactly what we already know: Louisiana’s population is the poorest in the nation.

[sarchertech]

I’m not actually sure which state has the highest percentage of people under a poverty threshold adjusted for COL because to do that math you need a specific poverty breakdown by household size and that’s far more effort than I’m willing to put in.

New York, California, Mississippi, Alabama, New Mexico, West Virginia, and Louisiana all have % below ALICE thresholds between 46 and 50%.

Based on that I think it’s very likely any one of those could have the highest percentage of people under a COL adjusted poverty threshold. Either way they’re so close that’s there’s no meaningful difference.

The real question is why would you use the percent of people under some threshold as your primary factor when deciding to label their entire popular “poor”.

I certainly wouldn’t use COL adjusted poverty rates to say that New York or California is poor, or that the populations of those states are poor.

Let’s say hypothetically that we constructed a rich threshold, say it’s $500k a year COL adjusted. And some hypothetical state was both number one for percentage of people over the rich threshold and number one for percentage of people below the poor threshold, would you say that this population was the poorest in the nation or the richest?