For more than 10 years, scholars, scientists and policy makers have been discussing and debating the need for a new measure of poverty that captures the experience of economic distress in America. Despite many discussions of the need to update the measure to more accurately reflect the meaning of being poor in America, because of politics and the fact that the measure’s threshold is set in the President’s office, there is no political will to really determine what actually and meaningfully constitutes being poor in America today.

The current poverty measure no longer accurately represents the experience of families and individuals. Created in the 1960s by Ms. Mollie Oshansky, of the Social Security Administration, the poverty measure was based on the caculation of a “thrifty diet” for a family of four. The measure was intended as a first cut of what economic security meant at the time. As originally constructed, the existing poverty measure no longer reflects the lived experience of Americans who are poor.

Writing for the New York Times, Anna Bernasek points out that the original measure focussed on food as a share of total expenses, which has dramatically declined since the 1960s (from 30 to 12% today). More important today are so called “non-essentials” such as housing, clothing, transportation, and medical expenses. In 1995, a National Academy Panel offered a set of revisions to make the poverty measure reflect today’s reality. Why weren’t any of the suggestions adopted? As Ann Bernasek noted, ”

The answer is politics. Thanks to a quirk of history, the poverty indicator, unlike many other economic statistics, is not under the jurisdiction of an authoritative statistical agency like the Bureau of Economic Analysis or the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Instead, it resides in perhaps the most political place of all: the office of the president. And during the last four decades, no president of either party has wanted to draw attention to a statistic that the nation has come to take for granted, especially if updating it might cause the number of people regarded as living in poverty to increase.

Ideology, meanwhile, has muddied the debate about how to improve the poverty count. Some experts have tended to advocate adjustments that raise the poverty line, while others prefer ways that decrease it. “

The first step forward in developing a realistic measure of poverty is to remove the determination of the poverty measure from the Office of the President and turn it over to an independent commission or agency involved in matters associated with poverty alleviation.