NOVANEWS
Roughly half of the difference is because the Trump administration is measuring poverty with a federal survey that tracks household reports of spending, including spending financed by credit cards and other debt, rather than income. Luke Shaefer and Joshua Rivera at the University of Michigan have already detailed some of the problems with this approach, but in short, the measurement just doesn’t line up with any of the struggles we associate with poverty. In years when we know that more families had trouble paying for basic necessities (for example, during the Great Recession), the measurement the Trump administration used (labeled “consumption” in the chart below) shows a decline in the poverty rate. Every other measurement shows an increase.
