Bloomberg's New Poverty Measure

NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg unveils a new poverty measure for New York City:

Under the federal formula, which is $20,444 for a family of four, some 19 percent of New Yorkers are considered poor, city officials said. Under the new formula, which takes into account New York's high cost of living, the poverty line is at $26,138 and 23 percent of New Yorkers are below it.

The new measure indicates a larger proportion of the city's poor is elderly, and that more working families are under the poverty line than in the federal measure. It has slightly lower poverty rates for children living in single-parent homes and people living in extreme poverty, indicating government programs are helping, officials said.

The new measure appears to be a variant of the one proposed by the National Academy of Sciences in the 1990s. Although an improvement on the outdated and basically arbitrary federal poverty measure, Bloomberg still sets the poverty threshold too low. EPI's basic family budget for a family of four in NYC is about $58,000, and half of median income (a common poverty measure in wealthy nations) in New York State for a family of four is about $37,000.