DN Editorial: Taking leave of our census

THE U.S. CENSUS released figures this week that show that the national poverty rate has decreased for the first time since 2006.

Don't rush to plan a victory parade, though. The percentage of people in poverty has dropped slightly, but the implications are more mathematical than practical: Median household income has remained the same, and the number of those in poverty in 2013 - 45.3 million - is about the same as the year before.

And worse news: The percentage of people living below the poverty level in the Philadelphia metro area rose slightly from 2010 to 2013, from 12.7 percent to 13.5 percent; poverty rates in the city fell slightly. Further, the median income for our metro area has declined since 2010.

So, our economic well-being as a country is still a troubled story. It's further complicated by the outdated methods for officially measuring poverty, which haven't changed since they were first developed in the 1960s.

Those standards were based primarily on food costs, which were a larger percentage of income. Fifty years later, housing and health costs have risen dramatically. To reflect this, a new Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) was developed to more accurately capture current expenses as well as to account for public assistance received by families.

But therein lies more bad news: Using the SPM bumps up the poverty figure even higher. According to a recent census report, using the supplemental measure increased the number of people in poverty by 2.7 million in 2012.

More important than quantifying the number of people in poverty, though, is figuring out what we do with the information. U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan has his ideas. We tend to be more supportive of remedies outlined by organizations like the Center for American Progress. CAP has outlined 10 solutions to reducing poverty, including increasing the earned income tax credit for childless workers, providing paid sick days, making investments that create jobs and raising the minimum wage. If the minimum wage in the late 1960s were indexed to inflation, the rate today would be $10.68 an hour, not $7.25.

In fact, we believe a more effective conversation about the economic well-being of all of us, not just the poor, should focus on wages. The simple fact is that wages have stagnated for more than a decade. According to the Economic Policy Institute, from 2007 to 2012, wages fell for the entire bottom 70 percent of the wage distribution, despite the fact that productivity grew by nearly 8 percent. Only the top 5 percent of earners saw higher wages. In other words, most of us are working harder, for less money.

How much harder? EPI's "The State of Working America" found that between 1979 and 2007, the average worker saw an annual increase of 181 work hours a year - which translates into 4.5 additional weeks a year.

The recent protests by fast-food workers have tapped into larger frustrations about the state of working America. Also, people now understand that working people who aren't paid enough to support their families rely on the rest of us in the form of government help like food stamps and Medicaid.

Maybe the best solution for reducing poverty is to understand that if we continue to insist on buying everything as cheaply as possible, we're only going to continue to shortchange ourselves - in more outsourced jobs, grueling hours and low wages.