Time to Rethink the Poverty Line
This short editorial provides a fine introduction to a challenge we need to talk about and address.  It also reminds us of the heroic work of economist Mollie Orshansky who created the index to measure the poverty line in the 1960s that we need to update today.

Some Basic Data in this Editorial
According to the way we currently calculate the poverty line (because the cost of food as a portion of a families overall spending has changed since Orshansky created the formula), a family of four is OUT OF POVERTY in America if they earn $23,501. 

If you were a parent in a family of four earning $23,501...would you feel like you had made it?!

If we utilize the same logic Orshansky used to recalibrate that level today, it would be $41,001.  This is nearly identical to the number most Americans point to in surveys when asked to identify the lowest income level needed to get by for a family of four today.

In the past 30+ years the productivity of American workers has increased 80% but worker wages have remained stagnant, while pay for the top one percent in the US has increased 3x over the same period.  I thought we believed that hard work should be rewarded?

This situation creates three problems:
An economic problem:  the consumer demand that at one time defined the American middle class has disappeared (as their relative share of income has declined)...accounting for about $1 trillion dollars a year in lost annual spending...and all the jobs that would create.

An honesty problem:  the unadjusted calculation of the poverty line makes it easier to pretend this problem is not causing enormous real harm to millions of American families with almost no attention to the problem, because we are not even describing the problem accurately.

A moral problem:  millions of hard working American families, with parents employed full time, live lives on the edge of poverty, one illness away from losing everything, and we are choosing to ignore both their pain and their (lost) potential contributions.