California to adopt New York’s Poverty Measure?

My colleague Anne Stuhldreher has a nice piece in the online Sacramento Bee this week, arguing that California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger should follow in the footsteps of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg by adopting an updated poverty measure in his jurisdiction. Now this all seems ripe for a “Twins” joke, but I’ll largely refrain.

Anne nails the case for ditching the old poverty measure: it’s inflexible, doesn’t represent the way people live today, takes no account of vast differences in cost-of-living by region, ignores the impact of state- and federal-efforts and leads to bad policy. I think it’s best stated here:

A number-cruncher by trade, Bloomberg turned to statistics to shed light on those suffering in the economic gloom. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” he was quoted as saying. His questions were basic: What people and places in New York have the greatest need? How could the city best deploy its limited public dollars to meet them? And what impact were its current programs having? But the federal poverty stats couldn’t provide answers. The mayor found them useless…How can you target limited funds when you can’t distinguish who needs them most?

This is an issue that has long been understood by social scientists, as Anne points out, Congress called on the National Academy of Sciences to develop an alternative policy measure 15 years ago and New York City has already adopted an alternative model. We held an event in September on “Updating Poverty” which featured work published in The American Prospect. Reid Cramer wrote an Issue Brief on the subject back in 2003.

So, will California catch on as Anne urges? It’s impossible to say at this point, but there are tangible signs of progress on this issue beyond the pioneering work done by Mayor Bloomberg and his colleagues in New York City and State. There are bicameral bills addressing the poverty measure, one from Rep. Jim McDermott (H.R. 2909) and one from Sen. Chris Dodd (S. 1625). The Measuring American Poverty (MAP) Act would implement a series of reforms not dissimilar to those recommended by the NAS 15 years ago. In addition, at a recent lecture organized by the AARP, President Obama’s Under Secretary for Economic Affairs in the Commerce Department, Dr. Rebecca Blank, emphasized that on her watch additional resources and weight would be put into presenting and maintaining an accurate and up-to-date alternative measure of poverty.

These are promising developments in the “good-government” category, and with an additional lift from the Governator, who knows what else might be possible?