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The Trump administration has proposed a change in the way the federal government measures poverty. On the surface, this proposal may appear to be an innocuous, technical adjustment. It’s not. Instead, this change would dramatically reduce the number of people who qualify for vital basic assistance programs, including Medicaid, children’s health care and food assistance. (emphasis added)

To understand what is happening, it helps to remember how the official poverty measure was first created.

The first U.S. poverty measure was a simple calculation. In the mid-1960s, a Social Security Administration researcher took a Department of Agriculture survey of household food consumption and found that a typical family of three or more spent about one-third of its post-tax income on food. The SSA then used USDA’s “economy” meal plan—a diet that would be nutritionally adequate in temporary or emergency situations—and multiplied that cost by three. That back-of-the envelope measure, which wasn’t based on an explicit accounting of costs for housing, health care, or anything other than food, is […]