As my previous post on the Administration's proposed "Supplemental Poverty Measure" implied, I'm not so sure that the proposal is an "excellent first step" toward a better system of measuring economic security and deprivation. I see it as a fundamentally conservative measure, too conservative for my tastes, and one that wouldn't do much to change the national debate about poverty away from its current conservative fixations on having poorly paid workers toil longer hours and marry more.

The statements of proponents of the new measure aren't particularly reassuring in this regard. In an interview on NPR, Becky Blank, the Administration's point person on the measure, was asked whether the new measure would be "better or worse" than the current, deeply flawed poverty measure, and responded that: "it's hard to say one is better or worse." And, in a New York City report on the new measure, Mayor Bloomberg's office explains that the "measure largely confirms widely accepted wisdom about the long-term determinants of poverty reduction" such as "increased work force participation [and] more children growing up in two-parent families."

Hmm, I tend to think poverty has more to do with the long-term decline in good jobs and unionization, the failure to adopt universal health insurance, the decline in the social wage, and the massive increase in inequality over the last few decades that prevented working- and middle-class families from getting their fair share of growth in the economy and productivity. So, a poverty measure that keeps us in "More Toil!, More Marriage!" land is not exactly my cup of tea.

While my critique comes from the left, Robert Rector and Glenn Beck have recently started to pound on the proposal from the far right. Rector, for example, argues that the new measure "will serve as the propaganda tool in Obama’s endless quest to “spread the wealth” because it would "rise automatically in direct proportion to any rise in the living standards of the average American." And Glenn Beck claimed that because the measure would use what he called a "comparative scale" that he would end up being counted as poor under it. His co-host went so far to call the proposed measure "Marxist."

I wish! A Supplemental Marxist Poverty Measure, now that's change we can believe in!

But seriously. The Rector/Beck line of attack raises a important question: as a nation, do we want to have an economy that boosts living standards for low-income, working-class families at roughly the same rate (or ever a greater rate) as living standards for middle-income families? Should a rising economic tide "lift all boats" in some rough proportion, or are we content with an economy that leaves Americans growing increasingly apart rather than together? I'm a lifting-all-boats kind of guy, one who thinks that America is a stronger nation if it grows together rather than apart, and that even the lowest-paid paid workers deserve their fair share of national growth and prosperity.

During the three decades after WWII, we had an economy that lifted all boats, especially those on the bottom and in the middle. But the dark era of Nixon-Reagan-Bush conservatism went in the opposite direction, and left the bottom and the middle behind. It's interesting that it was President Nixon who officially adopted the current federal poverty line and President Reagan who eliminated the Labor Department's Family Living Standards program in 1981. The Nixon poverty line that we currently have only adjusts for inflation, and doesn't keep pace with typical living standards; while the Family Living Standards program zeroed out by Reagan had produced basic family budget standards for more than three decades, ones that kept pace with living standards. It's almost like conservatives don't want to have national standards that keep track of whether working-class families are getting their fair share of the economic growth they are an essential part of. No surprise given what's happened to the living standards of those families since the Nixon-Reagan era began.

Although I look at this issue from a progressive perspective, it's also important to note that centrist and non-nutty conservatives who've studied poverty measurement agree that the only sensible poverty measures in a wealthy economy like ours are ones that are "comparative" in some sense. In their latest book, conservatives Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill explain that "relative poverty is a better measure of individual well-being than absolute poverty, because social context and community norms about what it means to be poor change over time, implying that the poverty line should be adjusted as economic growth makes everyone better off. ..." Haskins is a Republican whose previous gig was guiding the 1996 conservative welfare law through Congress as a staffer to the Gingrich Republicans; Sawhill is a DLC-style conservative Democrat, who sees poverty mostly in conventional "more work effort (regardless of job quality); more marriage" terms. I disagree with them on most everything, but here they're basically right on.

The other person who agrees with me, Haskins, and Sawhill, is Adam Smith—the dead Glaswegian and icon of conservatives everywhere, who wrote in The Wealth of Nations (1776: Book Five, Chapter II, Article Four):

By necessaries I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but what ever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably, though they had no linen. But in present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote [a] disgraceful degree of poverty...”

[emphasis added]

Given his belief that poverty and necessities should be gauged by "the custom of the country" and not some PhD-derived standard of how many potatoes it takes to stay alive, Adam Smith is now, by the whacked-out, Tea-Party standards of Beck/Rector modern-day conservatism, a Marxist propagandist agitating to spread the wealth. Up is down. Day is night. And "Wealth of Nations" is really just "Das Kapital" when you read it closely enough.