Last week, the “experts” were arguing that the official U.S. poverty measure was biased. Now we know that it was: downward.
Yep, while the experts assured us the problem of poverty was not as bad as we thought, because the official statistics overestimated the problem, the new Census Bureau estimates—based on the “supplementary poverty measure”—actually raise the number of poor people in the United States.
The rate of poverty in 2010 now stands at 16 percent (instead of the official 15.2 percent) and the number of poor people has risen to 49.1 million (from the 46.6 million under the official rate).
So much for the oft-repeated assertion that the official rate portrayed too bleak a picture of poverty in the United States.
[...] learned, first, that the extent of poverty was even [...]
[...] so poverty continues to grow: in 2010, 16 percent of the U.S. population, or 49.1 million people, fell below [...]