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| Poverty and Hunger Statistics | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The U.S. Government's "Yardstick" for measuring poverty |
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| Mollie Orshansky of the Social Security Administration originally developed the poverty thresholds in 1964. Orshansky based her poverty thresholds on the economy food plan — the cheapest of four food plans developed by the Department of Agriculture. These plans, based on data from 1955, estimated that families of three or more persons spent about one third of their after-tax money income on food. The calculation uses pretax cash income and excludes non-cash benefits such as public housing, Medicaid, and food stamps. Except for some minor changes in 1969 and 1981, the thresholds have remained the federal standard for measuring poverty.
For a more complete history of the official poverty measure, see The Development of the Orshansky Thresholds and Their Subsequent History as the Official U.S. Poverty Measure by Gordon Fisher on the U.S. Census website. |
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| National & State Statistics | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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