Statement
National True Cost of Living Coalition
Releases Statement on New Poverty Data
New York (September 12, 2024) – The National True Cost of Living Coalition released the following statement today after the U.S. Census Bureau published new data showing that fewer Americans are living below the federally defined poverty line:
It’s good that the poverty rate continues to decline. It shows not only that the economy is improving but that it’s improving for more and more Americans, especially those at the bottom of the income spectrum. That’s welcome news.
But the Official Poverty Measure itself shows only a thin slice of Americans who face financial hardship. It’s a flawed measure, both methodologically and in its narrow focus on subsistence level income, that hasn’t been updated since the 1960s. It may be adjusted annually for inflation, but it still defines the official baseline for poverty as “three times the cost of a minimum diet in 1963.” That’s not very informative.
Even the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) – which showed a slight increase in the number of Americans struggling to make ends meet – has limited uses. It considers unavoidable expenses like housing, childcare and healthcare as well as important resources like government benefits and tax credits. Yet, even with these modest additions it is designed to measure only the most acute material deprivation. The SPM still tells us nothing about those who might be making ends meet but are unable to plan for their futures and thus remain economically insecure.
We need a new measure, one that considers what it takes for 21st-century American families to get ahead, not just get by. Until we do, we won’t really know how millions of American families are faring.
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ABOUT: The National True Cost of Living Coalition was founded in 2024 by two leading nonprofit organizations championing economic mobility: the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies (FPWA) and the Community Service Society of New York (CSS). The Coalition’s mission is to improve how policymakers measure economic security in America. The official federal poverty measure, the most widely used measure of economic need, was first introduced more than 60 years ago. Since then, the American economy has changed dramatically, but the federal poverty measure has not kept up. The Coalition has commissioned the Urban Institute to develop a new, national measure of economic security to be unveiled later this year.